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A few anthropologists still look down on Richard Leakey, regarding him as an untrained upstart without proper academic credentials. But most of his colleagues believe he has more than made up in acquired knowledge for any lack of academic initials to place after his name. Yale's Pilbeam calls Leakey the "organizing genius" of modern paleoanthropology (the study of fossil hominids). Mary Leakey, a vigorous, cigar-smoking woman of 64 who still puts in eight hours a day exploring Olduvai, is also impressed. She says her son "is rather better than Louis was. I'm quite proud of him."
These days Leakey spends most of his time in Nairobi, mired in administrative work at the museum. But he still longs to be out in the field and at every opportunity loads his second wife, the former Meave Epps (his first marriage ended in divorce), and their two small children into his four-seat Cessna and flies out for a short stay at Koobi Fora.
Next summer, however, Leakey will lead a team to search south of Lake Turkana at a site called Suguta. The region is roadless, and he will have to go in, as in the old days, by donkey and camel. The discomforts may be worth it; a geological survey of the area shows fossil-bearing sediments between 5 million and 9 million years old, laid down in a period that has so far yielded few clues about the ascent of man.
Leakey's colleagues are making plans of their own in the continuing search. Prevented by war from continuing their work in Ethiopia, Johanson and Taieb plan to look for relics of early man in Arabia, where geological and climatic conditions are similar to those in the Afar region where Lucy was found. Pilbeam will soon go back to Pakistan in search of "new surprises." Simons is heading for Egypt in search of fossils that could enable him to trace man's roots back beyond Dryopithecus.
As the patient searchers discern more and more about early man and his predecessors, they also may gain an ever-widening insight about modern man, his nature, his failings and his future. Most major anthropologists reject the notion popularized by Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) and others that man is inherently aggressive and that his murderous instincts derive from his apelike origins. Indeed, they have found no evidence in their digs that man was anything but a peaceable hunter-gatherer before the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. It was farming, they believe, that created settlers with property to protect and fostered cultural differences that led to antagonisms between races and communities.
Richard Leakey's life work, in fact, has made him impatient with those of narrow ethnic and national perspectives. He makes it clear to all that he is a Kenyan and proud to be a citizen of that African nation. Furthermore, he notes that racial differences, as they are commonly perceived, are a superficial and recent development, having arisen only about 15,000 years ago. Says Leakey: "I am aghast that people think they are different from each other. We all share a