Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [21]
The East African Archaeological Expedition, financed by a variety of grants, consisted of Leakey and one assistant. For a year Leakey explored caves and burial sites among the lakes and volcanoes of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, collecting a mass of stones and bones. His account of the expedition—‘Stone Age Man in Kenya Colony’—appeared in Nature in July 1926, earning him recognition within the scientific community.
Back in England, Leakey fell under the spell of Sir Arthur Keith, spending hours working on fossil material at his laboratories at the Royal College of Surgeons. As Keith’s disciple, he became an ardent advocate of the ‘big-brain’ theory of human development, arguing that because the human brain could only have developed to such a size over a prolonged period, the separation of humans from apes must have occurred far back in antiquity, as far back as the beginning of the Miocene period, then dated at about 1 million years ago. Leakey also supported Keith’s contentions about the validity of Piltdown Man.
After raising funds for a second, larger expedition, Leakey returned to Kenya in 1928, accompanied by his newly married wife, Frida Avern, focusing again on Rift Valley sites. Throwing himself tirelessly into the work, he made significant discoveries of stone tools, including ancient hand-axes, and managed to piece together for the first time a sequence of prehistoric cultures in Kenya.
Yet his Cambridge mentors sometimes fretted about his propensity for grandstanding and overstatement. On learning that Leakey intended to attend a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Johannesburg in 1929, Alfred Haddon warned him in a letter: ‘Do not go in for wild hypotheses. These won’t do your work any good and it’s foolish to try to make a splash’. A distinguished East African geologist, E. J. Wayland, cautioned him against making ‘over-emphatic’ comments. ‘Believe me you will serve archaeology, the expedition and yourself best by maintaining a strictly scientific attitude’, he wrote in a letter. ‘You have the chance of making yourself, in time, one of the leaders of archaeological thought—don’t spoil your chances, for by doing so you will unintentionally let the science down’.
On this occasion, Leakey heeded their advice, delivering a restrained account of his work. To his delight, he found himself the centre of attention, while Raymond Dart and his Taung fossil stirred little interest.
No sooner had Leakey returned to England to widespread acclaim than he began to plan for his third expedition. His main objective this time was to solve the mystery of Oldoway Man, the skeleton that Hans Reck had discovered in Olduvai Gorge in 1913. Leakey had first studied Oldoway Man during a visit to Munich in 1927, and he went back there in 1929 to examine it further. The conclusion he reached was that it was not as ancient as Reck claimed but was of similar age to some of the human skeletons he had found during his expeditions in Kenya—Late Stone Age specimens dating back no more than 20,000 years.
Leakey discussed the matter with Reck in Berlin and invited him to join the expedition. Reck eagerly accepted, but he remained adamant about the ancient origins of Oldoway Man. Examining Reck’s collection of Olduvai rocks and fossils, Leakey noticed similarities to stone tools he had picked up in Kenya and suggested that they might find other examples at Olduvai. But Reck disagreed. He had searched the area diligently for stone tools over a period of three months, he said, and found none. But Leakey persisted. ‘I ... made a small bet that I would find Stone Age implements at Oldoway within 24 hours of arriving there’. The wager was for £10—‘a not inconsiderable part of my research funds for that year’.
Leakey’s third expedition set out from Nairobi in September 1931. The 260-mile journey to Olduvai, along rough tracks and across unmapped stretches of the Serengeti Plains, took four days. As the convoy of vehicles approached the gorge, Leakey