Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, a British-Kenyan paleoanthropologist noted for his discoveries of fossil remains that greatly advanced the study of human evolution. The son of English missionary parents, Leakey was born in Kabete, Kenya, and raised among the Kikuyu people; he later wrote a definitive study of their culture. Louis was initiated by tribal elders into the native Kikuyu society. As a young man he was adventurous, impulsive, driven, ruggedly handsome and romantically African. Leakey was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he eventually earned

Beginning in 1926, Leakey led expeditions to Olduvai, a river gorge in Tanganyika where he found important fossils and Stone Age tools. In 1948 he reported the finding in Kenya of a 20-million-year-old skull, which he named Proconsul africanus. Though it is now regarded to be too specialized to have been a direct ancestor of current ape and human populations, Proconsul is still considered a valuable model for what such an ancestor might have been like. Leakey's other important discoveries include the 1.75-million-year-old fossil hominid Zinjanthropus, now believed to be a form of Australopithecus, which was found in 1959 at Olduvai by his wife and partner, Mary Douglas Leakey, and the 1960 discovery of Homo habilis, Latin for "handy man," which Leakey claimed as the first member of the true human genus and the first true toolmaker. While the exact interpretation of Leakey's fossil finds is still in debate, their significance to the field of physical anthropology is universally acknowledged (Potts).

A descendant of British missionaries who came to Kenya in the 19th century, Richard Leakey was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and studied at Nairobi's Duke of York School. He left school at the age of 16 to start a business leading safaris to photograph wild African animals. When the country became independent in 1963, he chose to become a citizen of Kenya. Leakey led his first fossil-hunting expedition in 1967 at the age of 19. Since then, he has headed major expeditions to various sites in Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Leakey's most famous discoveries were found in the area around Lake Turkana, formerly Lake Rudolf in northern Kenya. Leakey's expeditions have uncovered more than 200 fossils of early hominines around Lake Turkana. These finds include a number of skulls and other bones of early representatives of the genus Homo which includes modern humans, as well as the earliest skull of an Australopithecus robustus, an extinct relative of modern humans. In 1984 one of Leakey's expeditions discovered an almost complete skeleton of an adolescent boy at Nariokotome on the western shore of Lake Turkana. The 1.6 million year old "Turkana Boy" is the most complete skeleton ever found from this period of human evolution. In 1983 Leakey was involved in another discovery: the 17-million-year-old jaw, teeth, and skull fragments of an apelike creature, Sivapithecus, a possible ancestor of both humans and apes (Potts).

Richard Erskine Frere Leakey was a Kenyan conservationist and fossil hunter whose discoveries have contributed immensely to the study of human evolution. His parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, introduced him to paleoanthropology at a young age. Paleoanthropology is the study of fossilized remains of extinct humanlike creatures called hominines, some of which are thought to be the ancestors of modern humans.

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