[1] Another of Leakey's legacies stems from his role in fostering field research of primates in their natural habitats, which he saw as key to understanding human evolution.

It makes me sadder still, however, and also very angry, when I think of the innumerable adult animals and birds deliberately caught and locked up for the so-called 'pleasure' and 'education' of thoughtless human beings.Louis's parents, Harry (1868–1940) and Mary (May) Bazett Leakey (died 1948), were Church of England missionaries in British East Africa (now Kenya).

Harry Leakey was assigned to an established post of the Church Mission Society among the Kikuyu at Kabete, in the highlands north of Nairobi.

Louis's earliest home had an earthen floor, a leaky thatched roof, rodents and insects, and no heating system except for charcoal braziers.

Louis read a gift book, Days Before History, by H. R. Hall (1907), a juvenile fictional work illustrating the prehistory of Britain.

Louis was told by C. W. Hobley, a friend of the family, that the British Museum of Natural History was going to send a fossil-hunting expedition led by William E. Cutler to the site.

[9] In 1927, Louis received a visit at a site called Gamble's Cave, near Lake Elmenteita, by two women on a holiday, one of whom was Frida Avern (1902–1993).

On the strength of his work there, he obtained a post-graduate research fellowship at St. John's College and returned to Cambridge in 1929 to classify and prepare the finds from Elmenteita.

To find supporting evidence of the antiquity of Reck's Olduvai Man, Louis returned to Africa, excavating at Kanam and Kanjera.

The following year, Frida was pregnant, suffered from morning sickness most of the time, and was unable to work on the illustrations for Louis's second book, Adam's Ancestors.

At a dinner party given in his honor, after a lecture of his at the Royal Anthropological Institute, Gertrude Caton-Thompson introduced her own illustrator, the twenty-year-old Mary Nicol.

Despite the searches for the iron markers, Boswell averred that "the earlier expedition (of 1931–32) neither marked the localities on the ground nor recorded the sites on a map.

Louis and Mary conducted a temporary clinic for the Maasai, made preliminary investigations of Laetoli, and ended by studying the rock paintings at the Kisese/Cheke region.

R. Copeland at Oxford recommended he apply to the Rhodes Trust for a grant to write a study of the Kikuyu and it was given late in 1936 along with a salary for two years.

[24] Apart from some bumbling around, during which he and some settlers stalked each other as possible saboteurs of the Sagana Railway Bridge,[25] his first task was to supply and arm Ethiopian guerrillas against the Italian invaders of their country.

The white leadership of the King's African Rifles used him extensively to clear up many cultural mysteries; for example, he helped an officer remove a curse he had inadvertently put on his men.

By now Louis was getting plenty of job offers but he chose to stay on in Kenya as Curator of the Coryndon Museum, with an annual salary and a house, but more importantly, to continue palaeoanthropological research.

With the money that now poured in Louis undertook the famous expeditions of 1948 and beyond at Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, where Mary discovered the most complete Proconsul fossil up to that time.

... Colonial governors and senior civil servants are not easy people to argue with; and, of course, I was not popular, because of my criticism of the colonial service ... Had it been possible to make the government open its eyes to the realities of the situation, I believe that the whole miserable episode of what is frequently spoken of as 'the Mau Mau rebellion' need never have taken place.While the Leakeys were at Lake Victoria, the Kikuyu struck at the European settlers of the Kenyan highlands, who seemed to have the upper hand and were insisting on a "white" government of a "white" Africa.

Louis had attempted to warn Sir Philip Mitchell, governor of the colony, that nocturnal meetings and forced oaths were not Kikuyu customs and foreboded violence, but was ignored.

While Louis was sick in camp, Mary discovered the fossilized skull OH 5 at FLK, Paranthropus boisei, famously identified as "Zinjanthropus" or "Zinj."

Louis opted for Zinjanthropus, a decision opposed by Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, but one which attracted the attention of Melville Bell Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society.

In 1960, geophysicists Jack Evernden and Garniss Curtis dated Bed I from 1.89 to 1.75 million years ago, confirming the great antiquity of fossil hominids in Africa.

At "Jonny's site", FLK-NN, Jonathan Leakey discovered two skull fragments without the Australopithecine sagittal crest, which Mary connected with Broom's and Robinson's Telanthropus.

[33] Not long afterwards, in 1960, Louis, his son Philip and Ray Pickering discovered a fossil he termed "Chellean Man", (Olduvai Hominid 9), in context with Oldowan tools.

Louis promptly celebrated with George Gaylord Simpson, who happened to be present, aboard the Miocene Lady with "Leakey Safari Specials", a drink made of condensed milk and cognac.

[36] In 1959 Leakey, while at the British Museum of Natural History in London, received a visit from Ruth DeEtte Simpson, an archaeologist from California.

Excavations at the site carried out by Leakey and Simpson revealed that they had located stone artifacts which were dated 100,000 years or older, suggesting a human presence in North America much earlier than others had estimated.

[37] The geologist Vance Haynes had made three visits to the site in 1973 and had claimed that the artifacts found by Leakey were naturally formed geofacts.

[39] One of Louis's legacies stems from his role in fostering field research of primates in their natural habitats, which he understood as key to unraveling the mysteries of human evolution.