August 7, 1903 (a Friday)

Louis Leakey

On this date, Louis S(eymour) B(azett) Leakey, an archaeologist and anthropologist, was born in Kabete, Kenya, of English missionaries parents. Leakey was largely responsible for convincing scientists that Africa, rather than Java or China, was the most significant area to search for evidence of human origins.

A Christian evolutionary biologist, Leakey is remembered for saying, “Nothing I’ve ever found has contradicted the Bible. It’s people with their finite minds who misread the Bible” (quoted in chapter 3 of Virginia Morell, 1995, Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings).

A passage from the last page of the fourth edition (1955) of Adam’s Ancestors: The Evolution of Man and His Culture by Louis Leakey is especially noteworthy as we begin the twenty-first century:

We know from the study of evolution that, again and again, various branches of animal stock have become over-specialized, and that over-specialization has led to their extinction. Present-day Homo sapiens is in many physical respects still very unspecialized− … But in one thing man, as we know him today, is over-specialized. His brain power is very over-specialized compared to the rest of his physical make-up, and it may well be that this over-specialization will lead, just as surely, to his extinction. … if we are to control our future, we must first understand the past better.