Richard Leakey dies: a staunch African

In 1951, a six-year-old stood on a scree field in western Kenya and got on his parents' nerves.

The family wasn't here on vacation.

The parents - Louis and Mary Leakey - were paleontologists and looked for fossil remains of early human forms in the eroding sedimentary layers of the East African rift valley.

Your work laid in part the basis for our current knowledge of the origin of the human species in Africa.

But her little son Richard was bored.

After repeated whining, he later recalled, his father had lost patience.

“Go and find a bone yourself!” He called out to him.

That's exactly what Richard Leakey did and found the jaw of an extinct pig.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Responsible for the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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The episode alludes to three recurring motifs in the life of Richard Leakey, who was born in Nairobi in 1944 as the second of three brothers and grandsons of Anglican missionaries. The first motive is the not always tension-free relationship with his famous parents. Although he learned the craft of paleontological fieldwork from scratch with them, for a long time he wanted nothing less than to follow in their footsteps. At the age of 16 he left school in order to earn his own living: by catching wild animals and selling animal skeletons to museums and educational collections, he had finally learned to identify bones from an early age. The bones remained his second motive for life. They returned to his biography with power,after he had developed his company into a safari provider in 1961 and flew tourists across the savannah after acquiring his pilot's license. During one of these flights he noticed areas at Lake Natron in northern Tanzania that seemed to be promising targets for the fossil search. He returned to one of them in an off-road vehicle and finally found what he was looking for. In 1967 he also recognized the potential of the sediments on the east bank of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya from the air.In 1967 he also recognized the potential of the sediments on the east bank of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya from the air.In 1967 he also recognized the potential of the sediments on the east bank of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya from the air.

Richard Leakey returned to paleanthropology and, without ever having studied the subject, became director of the National Museums of Kenya at the age of 25. At Lake Turkana, he was to make his most important discoveries with his excavation expeditions: These were once the skulls of

, one of the earliest species of our genus,

in Koobi Fora in the 1970s

, as well as of

, an early representative of

which is difficult to distinguish from this species

- the kind of people who were probably the first to leave Africa to spread over Asia and Europe. And west of Lake Turkana, his team came across perhaps the most famous find associated with the name of Richard Leakeys: In 1984, on the dry Nariokotome river, the almost complete skeleton of a

who lived 1.6 million years ago was

uncovered

: the “Turkana -Young".

But a little later Richard Leakey left science. His third life theme, the tireless zest for action, as well as his commitment to the endangered nature of his homeland, a new opportunity presented itself in 1989 when Kenya's President Daniel arap Moi appointed him head of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Leakey reorganized the agency and sent armed officials to the national parks, who were allowed to shoot poachers immediately according to an arap mois decree. The previously rampant poaching fell drastically.

But he didn't just make friends with his commitment. It has never been clarified whether the plane crash in which he lost both lower legs in 1993 was an assassination attempt. While he was still in the hospital, intrigues began that eventually forced him to resign as head of the Wildlife Service. But his thirst for action was unbroken. In 1995 he founded an opposition party and became a member of parliament in 1997. His opponents knew how to end his political career as early as 2001. Annoyed, he went to the Stony Brook University in the American state of New York as a professor. But in 2015 President Uhuru Kenyatta gave him another leadership position in the Wildlife Service. It was a homecoming for the committed Kenyan, whose British roots are only distant to him. On Sunday the 2ndRichard Leakey died in Nairobi on January 1st, 2022 at the age of 77.