(Seymour Bazett) (1903-1972) British archeologist, anthropologist, and paleontologist. With his wife Mary Leakey, he discovered gigantic extinct-animal fossils in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, as well as many remains of an early human type. Leakey's conviction that human origins lie in Africa was opposed to contemporary opinion.
Leakey was born in Kabete, Kenya, and studied in the UK at Cambridge. Between 1926 and 1937 he led a series of archeological research expeditions to E Africa. He was curator of Coryndon Museum, Nairobi, Kenya, 1945–61, and one of the founder trustees of the Kenya National Parks and Reserves. In 1961 he founded the National Museum Center for Prehistory and Paleontology.
Leakey began excavations at Olduvai Gorge in 1931. With Mary Leakey, he discovered a site in the Rift Valley of the Acheulian culture, which flourished between 1 million and 100,000 years ago. The Leakeys also found the remains of 20-million-year-old apes on an island in Lake Victoria. In 1960 they discovered the remains of Homo habilis, 1.7 million years old, and the skull of an Acheulian hand-axe user, Homo erectus, which Leakey maintained was on the direct evolutionary line of Homo sapiens, the modern human. In 1961 at Fort Ternan, Kenya, he found jawbone fragments of another early primate, believed to be 14 million years old.
His books for a general readership include Stone Age Africa 1936 and White African 1937.

(born Nicol) (1913-) British archeologist and anthropologist. In 1948 she discovered, on Rusinga Island, Lake Victoria, E Africa, the prehistoric ape skull known as Proconsul, about 20 million years old; and human remains at Laetoli, to the south, about 3,750,000 years old.
Nicol was born in London and became assistant to an archeologist. Her collaboration with Louis Leakey began when she illustrated a book he was working on. In 1936, Mary Leakey began excavating a Late Stone Age site north of Nairobi, and with her husband discovered the reamins of an important Neolithic settlement.
The Leakeys together and separately carried out excavations in Kenya, and accumulated evidence that E Africa was the possible cradle of the human race. By the middle of the 1960s Mary was living almost continuously at the permanent camp they had established at the Olduvai Gorge.
She described her work in the book Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man 1979.

(1944-) British archeologist. In 1972 he discovered at Lake Turkana, Kenya, an apelike skull, estimated to be about 2.9 million years old; it had some human characteristics and a brain capacity of 800 cu cm. In 1984 his team found an almost complete skeleton of Homo erectus some 1.6 million years old. He is the son of Louis and Mary Leakey.

City in Texas (USA); zip code 78873.