Louis Leakey

Hello! My name is Louis Leakey, and I want to tell you the story of my search for the very first humans. I was born on August 7th, 1903, in a place called Kabete, which is now in the beautiful country of Kenya in Africa. My parents were missionaries who came from England, but I considered Africa my true home. I grew up playing with children from the Kikuyu people, and I learned their language, their songs, and their customs. I felt more Kikuyu than English. The land itself was my greatest teacher. I spent my days exploring the hills and valleys, and I often found sharp, ancient stones that had been carefully shaped by people who lived a very, very long time ago. Holding these tools in my hand, I felt a connection to the past. Even as a young boy, I had a feeling that Africa held incredible secrets about where all people came from.

When I became a young man, I traveled to England to attend university in 1922. There, I studied archaeology, which is the study of ancient people through the things they left behind, and anthropology, the study of human cultures. In my classes, I learned that most scientists at that time believed the first humans evolved in Asia or Europe. But based on the stone tools I had found as a boy, I had a very different idea. I was certain that the story of humankind began in Africa! It was a bold claim, and many of my professors and fellow students didn't believe me. But I was determined to find proof. I decided to dedicate my life to searching for it. During my work, I met another wonderful fossil hunter named Mary Nicol. We shared the same passion for discovery, and we were married in 1936. Together, we returned to Africa to begin our life's work in a special place called Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

For many years, Mary and I worked under the hot African sun in Olduvai Gorge. The work was difficult and often disappointing. We found thousands of ancient animal fossils and countless stone tools, but the fossils of the early humans who made them were very hard to find. We kept searching, day after day, for over two decades. Then, one amazing morning in 1959, Mary spotted something sticking out of the dirt. It was a piece of a skull! After carefully putting the pieces together, we realized it belonged to a very early human relative. We nicknamed it 'Dear Boy.' This discovery was huge news and made scientists all over the world pay attention to our work in Africa. Just one year later, in 1960, our son Jonathan found something even more incredible: the fossils of a different kind of early human. After years of careful study, my team and I gave it an official name in 1964: Homo habilis, which means 'Handy Man' in Latin. We called it that because we found its bones right next to the oldest stone tools ever discovered. We had finally found the ancient toolmaker!

Finding fossils told us what our ancestors looked like, but I also wanted to understand how they might have behaved. I believed that one of the best ways to learn about early human behavior was to study our closest living relatives: the great apes. I looked for researchers who were brave and patient enough for this difficult work. I found three brilliant young women and helped them begin their own amazing field studies. I sent Jane Goodall to Tanzania to live with and study chimpanzees. I encouraged Dian Fossey to go to the mountains of Rwanda to study gorillas, and I supported Birutė Galdikas in her journey to Borneo to study orangutans. These three incredible scientists became known as the 'Trimates' or sometimes 'Leakey's Angels.' Their groundbreaking research taught the world so much about these intelligent animals and gave us new ways of thinking about our own human past.

I lived to be 69 years old, and my life was filled with the thrill of adventure and discovery. The fossils that my family and I uncovered in the African soil helped prove my big idea: that Africa is the cradle of humankind, the very place where our shared human story began. My work did not stop when my life ended. My wife Mary and our children continued the family tradition of searching for our ancient ancestors. Today, scientists are still exploring, digging, and learning more about our amazing human journey, all starting from those first clues we uncovered in the ancient soil of Africa.