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Perhaps no one is trying harder to fill in the blanks than Richard Leakey. Picking up where his father Louis left off at his death in 1972, Richard—with his Lake Turkana discoveries —has already moved to the forefront of modern anthropology. Now he is reaching out to coordinate research throughout East Africa and taking the lead in sorting and assembling the thousands of fragments of evidence that may someday reveal the secrets of man's origins.
In a sense, Leakey was born for his role. From the age of six months, he was taken on expeditions with his famous parents and learned to recognize fossils almost before he could talk. His childhood conversations were filled with the anatomical, geological and biological jargon of anthropology. His father —a Church of England missionary's son who was raised almost entirely in the African bush—taught "bushcraft" to Richard and his brothers Jonathan and Philip by sending them out to scavenge and survive in the wild. But as Richard grew up, he became restive living in the shadow of strong-willed and often autocratic Louis Leakey. "I was determined to make my own name," he recalls, "and I couldn't do that in my father's field. I had to go off on my own."
He did. For years Richard had escorted visiting scientists to his parents' dig at Olduvai and taken them around East Africa on courtesy safaris. In 1960, at the age of 17, he left school without graduating and set up a safari business on his own. The business did well, but Richard soon yearned to be back in the digs. Then, in 1963, on a chance flight over Lake Natron in northern Tanzania, he spotted what looked like interesting sediment beds and, encouraged by his parents, set off to explore the area. His first expedition proved to be a success; the team he assembled found a fragment from an Australopithecus robustus. He decided to become an anthropologist.
Convinced that he needed to broaden his scientific background, Richard left for London to catch up on his secondary-school studies, completing two years of work in seven months. He then passed his university entrance exams, but the next term was not scheduled to start for another nine months. Deciding that he did not have that much time to waste, Richard went home to Nairobi. He still does not hold an academic degree and has never returned to a campus—except as a speaker.
Back in Nairobi, young Leakey began rebuilding his neglected safari business and married Margaret Cropper, a young researcher who had been his mother's assistant at Olduvai. But he could not stay away from anthropology. In 1967 he joined an expedition organized by his father to the Omo Valley in Ethiopia. Well before it was over he knew he was ready to strike out on his own. Says Leakey: "I already knew how to organize an expedition and how to find fossils. I wanted to have my own show."
It was not long in coming. In 1968, Richard accompanied his father to Washington for a