RICHARD ERSKINE FRERE LEAKEY 19 December 1944 — 2 January 2022 Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 RICHARD ERSKINE FRERE LEAKEY 19 December 1944 — 2 January 2022 Elected FRS 2007 B Y D AVID P ILBEAM 1 AND B ERNARD W OOD 2,* 1 Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA 2 CASHP, Department of Anthropology, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA Richard Leakey was a palaeontologist, a palaeoanthropologist, an administrator, an advocate for wildlife and an advocate for Kenya, but above all he was a proud African. More than most of us he was shaped by his family history and particularly by his parents, but he built on that inheritance and their example to make his own singular contributions to science and the common good. Richard Leakey was a polymath who made things happen. As well as making substantial contributions to science, and to the long-term welfare of the people and the wildlife of Kenya, he had the foresight to realize that without strengthening its institu- tions, even his prodigious personal efforts would not be enough. The results of his encour- agement of science and conservation in Kenya, and more widely on the African continent, will be felt for years to come. F AMILY BACKGROUND Richard’s parents were both world-famous archaeologists. His father, Louis Leakey, was better known and way more flamboyant. Born to missionary parents in British East Africa (now Kenya), Louis had a brilliant academic career at Cambridge, where as a student at St * Email: bernardawood@gmail.com © 2025 The Author(s). Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. All third-party material, such as photographs and figures, remain © the original holder as indicated. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2024.0040 1 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 John’s College he gained both bachelor and doctorate degrees, the latter based on archaeo- logical and palaeontological projects in eastern Africa. Richard’s mother, Mary Leakey (née Nicol), arguably had more scientific heft and certainly the more impressive archaeological pedigree, being the great grand-daughter (on her mother’s side) of John Frere (1740 - 1807) FRS, who many credit with founding prehistoric archaeology. Mary Leakey made substan- tial contributions to our understanding of human evolutionary history, despite having no formal academic training. She relates that her schooling ended when, as a teenager, she was expelled from her (second) Catholic convent school for deliberately causing an explosion in a chemistry class, and for simulating an epileptic fit, a ‘performance’ that included putting soap in her mouth to create the requisite ‘foaming at the mouth’ (Leakey 1984, p. 32). In their different ways—which we explore below—both parents had a significant influence on Richard. L EARNING THE ROPES The middle of three sons of Louis and Mary, Richard was born in mid December of 1944 in what was then known officially as the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, less than two decades before Kenya became independent and his parents became household names. Louis had worked for the Kenyan section of the Colonial Special Branch, part of the British Intelligence Services, during the Second World War, but in 1945 he became curator of the Coryndon Museum (now the flagship institution of the National Museums of Kenya (NMK)). During his early childhood, Richard lived with his family in a modest bungalow (that still exists) in the grounds of the NMK. In the school holidays, the family decamped to wherever Richard’s parents were engaged in fieldwork, sometimes in western Kenya, but mostly at Olduvai (also spelled Oldupai) Gorge in Tanzania. There, according to Richard, Louis and Mary taught their children to recognize and identify stone tools and fossils, and from an early age the boys were put to work searching the outcrops for artefacts and fossils. Richard recalled that, when the boys were judged to be competent and responsible, they were instructed— mainly by their mother—in excavation techniques, and by the time they were teenagers they conducted—under parental or elder-sibling supervision—their own excavations. Being idle was not an option, and the school holidays were in effect a world-class ‘field school’ in practical palaeoanthropology and natural history. At Olduvai, and at the other sites where his parents worked during Richard’s childhood, the Leakey family lived and breathed archaeology and palaeoanthropology (Morrell 1995). In his early years at school in Nairobi Richard prospered, but when his parents moved from the museum house to their own property in Langata—on the outskirts of Nairobi— Richard had to switch schools. His parents decided on the Duke of York School, an institution modelled on an English public school. In this more formal and less flexible setting, Richard’s academic performance suffered, and he grew steadily more frustrated with his teachers and with the school. So much so, that at the age of 17 Richard informed his parents he wanted to leave school. They agreed on the condition he earned enough to live independently. Self-sufficiency would be a substantial challenge for most 17-year-olds, but in his early teenage years Richard had turned his knowledge of wildlife into an income by trapping 2 Biographical Memoirs Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 animals for Des Bartlett, a well known wildlife still photographer and movie cameraman, and a close colleague of Richard’s parents. Richard realized that the animals perishing in large numbers during a prolonged drought in 1960 and 1961 offered a different commercial opportunity. Richard collected the carcasses in his ancient Land Rover, cleaned the bones, assembled the skeletons and made a useful income by selling them to museums and colleges overseas. Richard also made money by helping to run his parent’s camp at Olduvai. As well as allowing him to leave the Duke of York School, these income-generating activities honed skills Richard used to run his own safari business. They also helped develop expertise (e.g. skeletal identification) that contributed to the success of the various field programmes Richard directed over the next two decades. Fieldwork at Natron and Baringo Mary Leakey recounts in her autobiography (Leakey 1984, pp. 123−124) that at the end of the 1959 Olduvai field season she resolved to find a more direct route back to Nairobi. Together with her youngest son, Philip, and Des Bartlett and his family, Mary set out to explore whether it was possible to return to Nairobi via Lake Natron, thus avoiding the lengthy detour through Arusha. The Natron route was shorter, but the poor—or non-exis- tent—roads took such a toll on the vehicles it was never used again. But in the process of exploring the alternative route, Mary had noticed ‘promising-looking Pleistocene sediments’ on the southwestern shores of Lake Natron. Meanwhile, Richard had earned enough from his safari company to pay for flying lessons, and in 1962—on his first solo flight—the route from Nairobi to Olduvai took him over the western shore of Lake Natron, where he noticed extensive areas of exposed sediments (a.k.a. exposures) just north of those reported by his mother. By 1963, Louis and Mary had recovered fossil evidence of what were assumed to be human ancestors at Olduvai, and a series of publications in Nature announcing these discoveries, plus the publicity generated by the National Geographic Society (NGS), meant that fieldwork at Olduvai was no longer being run on a shoestring. Their relatively generous NGS funding allowed Louis and Mary to provide support to help Richard explore the exposures west of Lake Natron. Thus, later in 1963 Richard and Glynn Isaac—a South African archaeologist then based at Olorgesailie, Kenya, where he was collecting data for his future Cambridge PhD—led a small reconnaissance expedition to Lake Natron. They recovered vertebrate fossils from exposures along the Peninj River, and, with more funding from his parents’ Olduvai NGS grant, Richard returned to Natron (figure 1). In addition to Glynn Isaac, the 1964 expedition included Richard’s younger brother Philip, Kamoya Kimeu, a Kamba working with Richard’s parents at Olduvai, and the photographer Hugo van Lawick, who had been commissioned by the NGS to record the expedition’s exploits. While searching for fossils in the outcrops exposed along the banks of the Peninj River, Kamoya discovered a hominin mandible. Its large and robust body, combined with diminutive incisors and canines and exceptionally large-crowned premolars and molars (Leakey & Leakey 1964), made it a good match for the dentition of the OH 5 Zinjanthropus boisei (now Paranthropus boisei ) ‘Nutcracker Man’ cranium Mary had found at Olduvai in 1959 (Leakey 1959). The discovery of the well preserved hominin mandi- ble helped Louis persuade the NGS to provide separate funding for a three-month-long Richard Erskine Frere Leakey 3 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 expedition to Natron later in 1964. Richard focused on the logistics—including persuading the Royal Air Force to loan the expedition a four-engine Blackburn Beverly to transport vehicles from Nairobi, while Glynn Isaac concentrated on the scientific activities. Despite extensive excavations at the mandible locality, no more hominins were recovered, but the expedition found 1.4 million-year-old stone artefacts at several other localities (Isaac & Curtis 1974; Manega 1993). In 1965 Richard went with his father to Washington, D.C., where they presented the results of the Olduvai and Natron fieldwork to the NGS. On the way back to Kenya, Richard stopped off in the UK, where he acquired the qualifications needed to apply to a UK university, but his safari business needed his attention, so he dropped his plan to attend university to return to Kenya. There, he consolidated his safari business by going into partnership with his friend Alan Root. Combining their safari businesses meant they could afford to hire a manager, who took charge of running the safaris. Richard retained his interest in Root and Leakey’s Photographic Safaris Ltd until 1974. In October 1965 John Martyn, a graduate student in Basil King’s East African Geological Research Unit run out of King’s College in London, recovered part of a hominin cranium (now KNM-BC 1) from the Upper Fish Beds exposed by a tributary of the Kapthurin River at Chemeron, on the west side of Lake Baringo, in Kenya (Martyn 1967). A small expedition dispatched by Louis from the NMK failed to find any more hominin remains at that locality, but elsewhere, in what later became known as the Kapthurin Formation, the expedition recovered a hominin mandible and some hominin postcranial bones including a well preserved ulna (2). Richard persuaded his father that he was the best person to take charge of the excavations at this second locality, explaining ‘I had just got married, I had Figure 1. Richard Leakey excavating a stone tool in September 1964 at the Acheulean site of MSH (a.k.a. Bayasi, and later renamed PEES 2) on the South Escarpment at Peninj, near Lake Natron. (© Bob Campbell.) 4 Biographical Memoirs Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 no job and I needed to do something’ (Leakey 1984). Together with his new wife, Margaret (née Cropper), Richard spent the next few months excavating and exploring the Kapthurin Formation (2). No more hominins were recovered, but the discovery of an articulated fossil elephant skeleton—and its subsequent excavation, preservation and transfer on a wooden platform to the NMK for display—provided Richard with yet more invaluable practical palaeontological experience. Richard’s first solo scientific publication was the description of a new species of fossil monkey recovered from the Kapthurin Formation (1). Fieldwork in the Lower Omo Valley Louis Leakey’s intelligence work during the Second World War had taken him into Ethiopia, so he was well aware of the potential of the many fossiliferous sediments exposed in that region, and he had long been interested in expanding the search for early hominins into southern Ethiopia. With the support of the first Kenyan president, Jomo Kenyatta, Louis succeeded in persuading Emperor Haile-Selassie to allow the 1967 International (i.e. France, Kenya and the US) Omo Research Expedition (IORE) to search for hominin fossils in the Lower Omo Valley. However, when the time came to leave for Ethiopia, Louis was not well enough to lead the Kenyan contingent, so, although he paid a short visit to the Lower Omo Valley during the 1967 field season, he delegated the leadership of the Kenyan contingent to Richard (figure 2). Likewise, Camille Arambourg’s frailty led him to delegate the day-to-day leadership of the French contingent to Yves Coppens, who took over as leader after Arambourg’s death in 1969. These replacements resulted in the leader of the US contingent, Francis Clark Howell, becoming the de facto leader of the IORE. The Kenyans—probably because Louis had been replaced by Richard—were allocated localities in the Lower Omo Valley that turned out to be either much older (Brown Sands and White Sands) or much younger (Kibish) than the sediments at Olduvai, Peninj and Baringo. Despite this disappointment, the Kenyans recovered a cranium, Omo I, from the Kibish Formation (2) (Day 1969) that is still the earliest fossil evidence for Homo sapiens (a.k.a. anatomically modern humans) (Vidal et al. 2022). On one of his flights from Nairobi to the Lower Omo Valley, Richard had noticed promising-looking exposures on the eastern shore of what was then called Lake Rudolf, in northern Kenya. Clark Howell gave Richard the use of the US contingent’s helicopter for a day, which enabled Richard to establish that the exposures he had seen from his aeroplane contained vertebrate fossils. Instead of returning to the Lower Omo Valley the following year, Richard decided to explore the potential of the exposures on the eastern side of the lake, so in 1968 he led the first expedition to the region that became known as East Rudolf. Richard, a proud Kenyan, was once again searching for fossils in his own country. Fieldwork at East Rudolf Before relating the history of fieldwork at East Rudolf, it is worthwhile reminding readers of the state of African palaeoanthropology in the late 1960s. Prior to Richard’s parents’ discoveries at Olduvai Gorge, most early hominins from Africa had been recovered from cave sites in southern Africa. Although Raymond Dart had stressed the significance of the palaeohabitat at what was then called Taungs (Dart 1925), most of the later publications Richard Erskine Frere Leakey 5 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 announcing the discovery of early hominins from Sterkfontein, Kromdraai, Makapansgat and Swartkrans paid little attention to their context. In the early days (i.e. prior to C. K. [Bob] Brain’s involvement) there were no ‘teams’ of researchers working at the southern Africa cave sites, and until the recruitment of T. C. (Tim) Partridge, earth scientists played Figure 2. Richard Leakey (left) at the Omo in 1967 showing Louis Leakey (right) some of the fossils collected during the field season. (© Bob Campbell.) 6 Biographical Memoirs Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 only a minor role in hominin-related research. Indeed, this lack of geological control was the reason the authorities tried to stop Robert Broom FRS searching for fossils at Kromdraai and Sterkfontein in the mid 1940s. The research at Olduvai was not the first multidisciplinary investigation of a hominin fossil site (Carline et al. 2022), but it was arguably the first such investigation of an early hominin site in Africa, a model that was replicated by Clark Howell and Yves Coppens for the IORE, and then by Richard at East Rudolf. Initially, what later became known as the East Rudolf Research Project (ERRP) was a modest affair. The 1968 field expedition comprised Richard, his then wife Margaret, Paul Abell, a chemist who had previously worked with Richard at Baringo, and Bob Campbell, a NGS photographer who had been with Richard at Natron. The Kamba field and camp crew were led and supervised by Kamoya Kimeu, who had worked with Richard at Natron. Other members were Ron Clarke, a fossil preparator working at the NMK, and several students, including Bernard Wood (BW), an author of this memoir. Although the first expedition recovered a modest collection of hominin fossils (N.B. the cited publications refer to them as hominids, which was the contemporary usage), the combined haul of hominin and mammal fossils was impressive enough to attract NGS funding for a second field season. The 1969 expedition, which included primatologist Meave Epps and geologist Kay Behrensmeyer, recovered a relatively complete hominin cranium (referred to as ‘FS−158’, but now KNM-ER 406), and the base of a second hominin cranium (referred to as ‘FS−210’, but now KNM-ER 407) (3). The team also discovered stone tools similar in appearance to those Richard’s parents had recovered from the lowest levels at Olduvai (4). Future funding was assured. Even at this early stage of the field research, Richard was thinking strategically about how the results of the fieldwork should be communicated to the scientific community. Frustrated that information about the hominins being discovered in southern Africa was slow to appear, Richard decided he would follow his father’s lead and announce the major discoveries in letters or papers submitted to Nature , and many of these single-author publications are cited below. At his retirement party, John Maddox (HonFRS 2000), the editor of Nature in the 1970s, told BW that he never sent Richard’s manuscripts—most of which BW hand-delivered to Nature ’s Dickensian-like offices in Little Essex Street—out for review because they concerned fossils so recently discovered no-one outside the field project had seen them. The following year Richard invited his former Natron colleague, the archaeologist Glynn Isaac, who was now based at the University of California, Berkeley, to be the co-leader of the ERRP (N.B. after Lake Rudolf was renamed Lake Turkana, the project was renamed the Koobi Fora Research Project (KFRP)). Over the next few years, the two co-leaders assembled a multidisciplinary team of researchers (Harris et al . 2006), but the functional heart of the KFRP was Kamoya Kimeu and the field crew (a.k.a. the ‘Hominid Gang’) that searched for—and found most of—the hominin and vertebrate fossils (figure 3). The 1970 field season resulted in the recovery of hominin fossils that consolidated the case for the same taxic diversity Louis and Mary had been finding evidence of at Olduvai. More evidence (e.g. the mandible KNM-ER 729 and the partial cranium KNM-ER 732) was referred to Australopithecus , now Paranthropus boisei , and two mandibles (KNM-ER 730 and 731) were ‘provisionally referred to the genus Homo ’ (5). Richard suggested it was likely that KNM-ER 406 and 732 represented ‘the two sexes of the same species’, Richard Erskine Frere Leakey 7 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 and he made the case for morphological stasis within Australopithecus (see below for a discussion of Richard’s use of Australopithecus ), pointing out ‘there is no evidence of significant changes occurring between the early specimens in the lower part of the sequence and the later ones at the top of the section’ (5). Richard also highlighted postcranial evidence for taxic diversity, suggesting that, while the KNM-ER 737 femur ‘is very close to material attributable to Homo ’, other femoral specimens are ‘distinctive and presumably should be assigned to Australopithecus ’ (5). These remarkably prescient assessments were subsequently vindicated by additional evidence and analysis (e.g. Wood 1991; Grine et al 2022). After Richard’s divorce from his first wife, Margaret, he married Meave Epps in October 1970, and thereafter Meave, a specialist in fossil primates, played an increasingly important role in the KFRP, especially when Richard’s managerial commitments (see below) claimed more of his time and when ill health prevented him coming to the field. The hominins recovered during the 1971 field season—15 referred to Australopithecus and 11 to Homo —further strengthened the case for ‘the contemporaneity of Australopithe- cus and Homo ’ (6). The Homo specimens included a juvenile mandible, KNM-ER 820, and the KNM-ER 992 adult mandible—later selected by C. P. Groves and V. Mazák (Groves & Mazák 1975) as the type specimen of Homo ergaster . Richard made special note of the postcranial evidence, with the suggestion that the KNM-ER 813 foot bone is ‘remarkably similar to the tali of modern man and distinctive from the two fossil tali from Olduvai and Kromdraai’ (6) (Wood 1974). John Robinson, the doyen of southern African palaeoanthropologists, pointed out that Richard was using ‘the genus name Australopithecus differently from most workers’, such that ‘his use of Australopithecus corresponds with my use of Paranthropus ’. Despite this difference in taxonomic usage, Robinson confirmed that ‘what Richard Leakey is doing with Figure 3. Richard Leakey (right) and Kamoya Kimeu (left) in Area 1 at Koobi Fora in 1976 with the KNM-ER 3883 cranium. (© Bob Campbell.) 8 Biographical Memoirs Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 the East Rudolf specimens is biologically the same as I did with the South African material’, concluding that ‘his analysis lends no more support to the single species hypothesis of early hominids than does mine’ (Robinson 1972, p. 240). The 1972 field season was even more productive and consequential, with 18 homi- nin fossils attributed to Australopithecus , 16 to Homo and four hominins—including the KNM-ER 1482 mandible—whose affinities were ‘far from clear’ (7). Four of the specimens attributed to Homo , the KNM-ER 1470 cranium (figure 4), a femur (KNM-ER 1472), an associated lower limb skeleton (KNM-ER 1481) and a proximal femur (KNM-ER 1475), were described in more detail in a separate publication (8). There was no ‘direct association of the cranial and postcranial’ remains, so the latter were ‘only provisionally assigned to the same species as the cranium’, but breaking with previous practice, Richard proposed that the four specimens ‘should be attributed to Homo sp. indet. rather than remain in total suspense’ (8). News about the discovery of KNM-ER 1470, and the possibility it pushed the origin of Homo back to earlier than 2.61 ± 0.26 Ma (but see below) resulted in Richard being a late invitee to a symposium held in November 1972 at the Zoological Society of London, organized by Lord Zuckerman FRS to honour his mentor, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith FRS. It must have been intimidating for Richard to present the new evidence to such an august audience, but his contribution was well received, and a paper based on the presentation and the ensuing discussion was published the following year (9). Zuckerman’s condescen- sion to Richard—and his father—is immortalized in the recorded discussion, during which Zuckerman referred to Richard as an ‘amateur’, describing Richard (and his father) as ‘people interested in collecting fossils on which specialists can work’ (9). The press got wind of Richard’s attendance at the symposium, but Zuckerman, who was then the president of the Zoological Society of London, would not allow journalists into the meeting rooms at the zoo, so Richard hastily arranged a press conference at the Kenyan Embassy in nearby Portland Place. The photographs of Richard and KNM-ER 1470 that appeared in newspapers the next day were taken in the garden of the embassy. Richard had the satisfaction of being able to show the new fossils to his father a few weeks before Louis died on 1 October 1972. The 1973−1976 field seasons at Koobi Fora were no less momentous. Among the 21 hominins collected in 1973, Richard linked the KNM-ER 1802 mandible with the ‘same genus and species as KNM-ER 1470 and 1590’, suggested that the smaller-brained cranium KNM-ER 1813 ‘has some of the features seen in the gracile, small brained, hominid Australopithecus africanus ’ and judged the KNM-ER 1805 skull to be ‘undoubtedly important, but its interpretation is enigmatic’ (12). At the end of the 1973 field season, Richard wrote that it is possible that ‘more than two contemporary hominid lineages’ were being sampled at Koobi Fora (12) (figure 5). Twenty-eight more hominins were collected in the 1974−1975 field seasons. Notable discoveries were KNM-ER 3732, a cranial vault ‘strikingly similar to KNM-ER 1470’ (13), KNM-ER 3228, a well preserved innominate considered to be ‘good evidence for the Homo lineage’ (13), and KNM-ER 3733, a well preserved adult cranium ‘very similar to the H. erectus material from China’ (13). The latter was recovered in situ from a horizon equivalent in age to KNM-ER 406. Evidence from the same time period of such morpholog- Richard Erskine Frere Leakey 9 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 ically different hominin crania (14) effectively falsified the Brace/Wolpoff ‘single species hypothesis’ referred to by Robinson (Robinson 1972). The deterioration of Richard’s health in the late 1970s, which culminated in his first kidney transplant in 1979, kept him out of the field, and after working for 12 years on the Figure 4. Richard Leakey at the NMK holding KNM-ER 1470 in his left hand, and KNM-ER 406 in his right hand. (© Marion Kaplan/Alamy Stock Photo.) Figure 5. Meave and Richard Leakey at the discovery site of the KNM-ER 1813 early Homo cranium in area 123, Bura Hasuma, Koobi Fora in 1973. (© Bernard Wood.) 10 Biographical Memoirs Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 eastern side of Lake Turkana, in 1980 the field crew searching for fossils in Plio-Pleistocene sediments shifted its attention to exposures on the west side of the lake, but the search for Miocene primate localities continued on the east side (18, 20, 21) (Wood 1974, 1991). The second phase of Richard’s plan for the publication of the hominin fossil evidence recovered from East Rudolf (a.k.a. Koobi Fora) was for a team of anatomists to describe the detailed morphology of the hominin fossils, but not compare them with other hominins—in papers submitted to what was then called the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (now the American Journal of Biological Anthropology ). In the third phase, the anatomical team would conduct thorough comparative analyses of the hominin fossils and then report their findings in a series of monographs. Richard’s preference was that Kenyans should be involved in the analysis of hominin fossils recovered in Kenya, so he initially invited Joseph Mungai, professor of anatomy at the University of Nairobi, to undertake the hominin descriptions. But Mungai was busy developing the University of Nairobi’s new Medical School—he was appointed its dean in 1969—so he advised Richard to involve Alan Walker (1938 – 2017) FRS, who had recently moved from Makerere University in Uganda to work with Mungai (5). The rate of hominin fossil recovery documented above meant that the task of describing the hominins soon exceeded anything Mungai and Walker could manage, so Richard added Michael Day (10, 11) and one of the authors of this memoir to the roster. With respect to the plans for the monographic treatment of the hominins, most of the fossils recovered by the KFRP were cranial and dental, but none of what by 1973 had become a three-person team—Mungai had stepped down when he was appointed deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Nairobi in 1973—had any expertise that would qualify them to take on the challenge of sorting out the taxonomy of the bulk of the hominin fossils (i.e. crania, lower jaws and teeth) (McRae & Wood 2025). Michael Day—the senior member of the team—had helped describe the postcranial hominin fossils recovered by Richard’s parents from Olduvai, Alan Walker’s research interest was primate locomotion, and BW’s only research experience was the analysis of the OH 8 talus he undertook for his undergraduate thesis. We all taught human anatomy to medical students, but none of us knew much about teeth or had any special expertise in the anatomy of the head. In 1974 the three anatomists plus Richard were all in New York for the Early Hominids of Africa Wenner-Gren Conference (Jolly 1978). Visibly frustrated we could not work out an amicable agreement; Richard invited us to his room in the Westbury Hotel. Typi- cally, he would not let seniority determine the region of the skeleton we were responsible for, so, after a brief inconclusive discussion, Richard decided to resolve the impasse. He disappeared into the bathroom, reappearing with three matches—at the time he still smoked a pipe—gripped between his thumb and forefinger, their length concealed in his palm. BW’s recollection is that Michael Day drew the longest match and Alan Walker the next longest. Michael chose to describe and analyse the postcranial remains, and Alan wanted to work on the demography of the fossil hominins. Richard turned to BW and said: ‘Woody, you are doing the head!’ Seventeen years separated the match-drawing and the publication of the monograph on the Koobi Fora cranial remains (Wood 1991) (figure 6). Richard Erskine Frere Leakey 11 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 L EARNING THE HARD WAY Before Richard’s father had become a household name, Louis’s career as a prehistorian had met with mixed success, and Louis had acquired a reputation for ‘shooting from the hip’. On several occasions Richard confided to BW that this aspect of his father’s reputation preoccupied him, and BW’s strong impression is that, to avoid the same fate as his father, Richard tended to err on the side of caution when assessing the significance of the discover- ies made at Koobi Fora. Yet this inclination did not always shield Richard from controversy. Evolution is change through time, so establishing the temporal sequence—and even better the absolute chronology—of the fossil and archaeological record is crucial for its interpretation. Sequence is relatively easy to establish within sites that are temporally and spatially restricted, but it is more difficult when the fossil and archaeological evidence comes from localities scattered across the landscape. It is more difficult still at an even larger scale, which is the case when researchers tried to establish the temporal sequence of evidence recovered from different locations within an area as large as the Turkana Basin (i.e. the Lower Omo Valley plus the sites around the lake). The fossil and archaeological evidence recovered by the ongoing prospecting and collection efforts in the Turkana Basin needed to be interpreted within a sound stratigraphic and chronological framework. In the Lower Omo Valley to the north, the stratigraphic record of the mainly fluvial sediments is relatively continuous and well exposed. In contrast, on the eastern side of the lake, episodes of regional erosion have removed sediments during some critical time intervals, and more recent local erosion has eliminated large areas of Figure 6. Richard Leakey (left) and the BW (right) in the laboratory of the Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology at the National Museums of Kenya at the end of the 1973 field season attempting to agree on how to divide the Koobi Fora hominins into genera. This is Richard Leakey’s interpretation, with Homo on the left, and his Australopithecus (others Paranthropus ) on the right. (© Bob Camp- bell.) 12 Biographical Memoirs Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 sediment, resulting in limited or no physical continuity between the remaining sediment blocks. In the early 1970s, Ian Findlater, together with Carl Vondra’s stratigraphic research group, had assembled a composite stratigraphic section suggesting how the different fossiliferous areas on the eastern side of the lake were correlated (Vondra et al . 1971; Fitch et al . 1974). There was also particular pressure to understand the temporal relationship between the large-brained KNM-ER 1470 cranium and the Oldowan artefacts previously recovered at the Kay Behrensmeyer Site (KBS). Pumices from the KF-IIA Tuff (a .k.a. ‘KBS tuff’), within which the archaeological evidence was stratified, contained crystals of several ages. F. J. Fitch and J. A. Miller (Fitch & Miller 1970) claimed their step-heating method had unlocked the real age of the tuff, which they estimated to be 2.6 Ma. This meant any fossil or archaeological evidence in—or below—the KBS tuff was at least half a million years older than the oldest hominin fossil and archaeological evidence recovered from Olduvai. But by opting for such an early age for the KBS tuff, Fitch and Miller set up a conflict between their age of 2.6 Ma and the much younger biochronological estimate of ca 1.9 Ma based on correlations with independently dated fauna collected in the Lower Omo Valley and at Olduvai (White & Harris 1977). What came to be known as the ‘KBS tuff controversy’ was ‘the elephant in the room’ at the 1973 Wenner-Gren Conference entitled ‘Earliest Man and Environments in the Lake Rudolf Basin’ (15). But less than two years later, at a symposium at the Geological Society of London convened in February 1975 to explore the geological context of fossil hominin discoveries in the Gregory Rift Valley, including the Omo–Turkana Basin (Bishop 1978), the controversy was front and centre. Richard and his team stood behind the earlier Fitch and Miller date, whereas Clark Howell and his colleagues working in the Lower Omo Valley favoured the temporally more recent biochronology-based estimate. Exchanges between the two camps were heated. Richard’s instinct to be loyal to his collaborators was one of the reasons he initially supported the Fitch and Miller date. Another was that Richard and Glynn Isaac were convinced the future of geochronology was to move away from using biochronology in favour of methods based on well understood physical and chemical processes. Richard’s instincts were generally correct, but Fitch and Miller had not fully appreciated the real-world complexities of the material they were analysing, and they over-played their hand by choosing the wrong plateau in the step-heating sequence. An additional complication was that a study of the pig fossils collected from the Lower Omo Valley and from Koobi Fora (Harris & White 1979) suggested that several of the tuffs at Koobi Fora had been miscorre- lated. Elegant chemistry-based tuff correlations (Cerling et al. 1979), plus a new 1.89 Ma date for the KBS tuff (McDougall et al. 1980), prompted the widely respected Olduvai geologist Richard (Dick) Hay to suggest that the ‘KBS tuff controversy’ was resolved (Hay 1980). Once Richard was convinced the erroneous age of the KBS tuff was a symptom of a larger problem involving the interpretation of the stratigraphy at Koobi Fora, he moved swiftly to invite Frank Brown, the lead geologist in the Lower Omo Valley, to join the KFRP. Within a few years, Brown had initiated a wholly new perspective, which treated the Turkana Basin as an integrated whole, and by introducing a method called ‘tuff-fingerprin- Richard Erskine Frere Leakey 13 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 ting’ he and his colleagues were able to correlate tuffs across all the main sediment blocks around the lake. E XPANDING FIELD WORK The hominins discovered at West Turkana were no less consequential than those recovered from the eastern side of the lake. The remarkably complete associated skeleton KNM-WT 15000 confirmed the presence of early African Homo erectus (17), and the 2.5 Ma KNM- WT 17000 cranium sampled the likely precursor of P. boisei sensu stricto (19). Richard’s responsibilities at the NMK, and later as director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, meant that the responsibility for running the KFRP were passed on to his scientific and life partner Meave, who was later joined by their daughter Louise. By the time Meave Leakey began to re-explore the sites of Lothagam in 1989 and Kanapoi in 1994, both southwest of Lake Turkana, Richard had no direct involvement in fieldwork, other than providing encourage- ment and occasional logistical support (Leakey & Harris 2003, p. 11). Field seasons at West Turkana resulted in the recovery of even more evidence of hominin taxic diversity (Leakey et al . 2001), as well as the discovery of 3.3 Ma stone artefacts that were cruder than the Oldowan KBS artefacts (Harmand et al. 2015). This summary of the results of the field research around Lake Turkana (the name of the lake had been changed in 1975 by President Jomo Kenyatta) has focused on hominin fossils, but over the years, the KFRP, plus Meave Leakey’s field projects at Lothagam and Kanapoi, have accumulated an impressive collection of fossils belonging to other mammals, thus providing the biotic and palaeoenvironmental context essential for interpreting the hominin fossil record (Harris 1983, 1991; Leakey et al. 1996; Jablonski & Leakey 2008; Bobe et al 2020, 2022; Brugal & Roche 2022). The years of fieldwork on both sides of Lake Turkana were extraordinarily productive. The fossil hominins recovered include the most important evidence we have for Australopi- thecus anamensis , early Homo , Paranthropus aethiopicus and P. boisei , and early African H. erectus (figure 7). What we presently understand about this phase of human evolution largely rests on the evidence recovered by expeditions led by Richard. O THER LIVES In addition to leading teams contributing directly to expanding the fossil and archaeological record, Richard contributed less directly but importantly to human origins research by developing and strengthening institutions, starting with the old Coryndon Museum, of which his father had been curator. In 1968, after Richard became its acting administrative director, he dragged the museum—at times kicking and screaming—into its new role as the flagship institution of the NMK. When Richard was appointed, the museum was still a colonial-era institution, largely staffed at the upper levels by expats, with exhibits directed at expats and tourists. Richard’s father had founded the Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology, which was affiliated with the old Coryndon Museum, but the chronically under-resourced centre could not cope with the fossil and archaeological evidence that was being recovered across 14 Biographical Memoirs Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 11 April 2025 Kenya—particularly in northern Kenya. Richard’s administrative ‘nous’, combined with his ability as a fundraiser, were critical to the growth of the NMK at a crucial stage in the development of prehistory research and education in Kenya. Another important contribution was Richard’s initiative to develop antiquities legislation ensuring fossils found in Kenya remained in the country. Richard wanted Kenya to be the regional leader of prehistoric research in eastern Africa. After his father’s death in 1972, part of that vision involved raising funds for The Interna- tional Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory (TILLMIAP), which Richard did with great success, and