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of his failing health, Leakey asked his twenty-three-year-old son Richard to lead it. Richard Leakey had hitherto shown little interest in following ‘the Leakey tradition’. He had dropped out of secondary school at the age of sixteen without any qualifications and had become involved in the safari business in East Africa, organising supplies, transport and personnel for tourists and film crews. ‘I was determined to distance myself from my parents and their work on fossils and prehistory, largely because I wanted to be my own man’, he recalled. Louis had hired him essentially as a safari manager, relying on him to deal with the logistics of the expedition. The only member of the Kenyan field team with professional training in archaeology and anthropology was Richard’s wife, Margaret. On scientific matters Richard was expected to keep in radio contact with his father.

The Omo Research Expedition set out from Nairobi in June 1967 in a convoy of trucks and Land Rovers carrying forty people, taking five days to cover the 500-mile journey to the lower Omo Valley. It was billed as an international enterprise but rapidly divided into three competing groups. Each team set up camp in a separate concession area, determined to become the first to find the oldest, most spectacular fossil. The French had been allocated the southernmost fossil deposits where Arambourg had previously worked; the Americans were sited further to the north; the Kenyans got the least interesting area of deposits—fifty square miles of sediments that lay on the opposite side of the Omo River. Richard Leakey soon decided that both the French and the Americans were lazy and incompetent; and the French and Americans considered him to be untrained and uneducated.

It was the Kenyans who nevertheless turned up the first significant find. Three weeks after their arrival, a sharp-eyed Kamba fossil-hunter, Kamoya Kimeu, who had worked with the Leakeys at Olduvai since 1960, spotted fragments of a hominid skull in rock formations on the banks of the Kibish River; excavations produced other fossil parts. Upon examination, Omo I, as it was called, proved to be a specimen of modern man—Homo sapiens—but one that was far older than any previous discovery. The prevailing view at the time was that Homo sapiens had emerged about 60,000 years ago. Omo I was estimated to be 130,000 years old, though because of the difficulties of dating with accuracy, there were doubts about whether this estimate was reliable.

The Kenyan discovery, however, was soon overshadowed by a French triumph. Two weeks later, Yves Coppens from the Musée de l’Homme found the lower jawbone of a primitive australopithecine dating back at least 2 million years. By the end of the season, both the Americans and the French had made further gains, but the Kenyans had little to show apart from another ‘modern-man’ skull. ‘I was conscious that my team was doing less well than the others’, Richard Leakey wrote in his autobiography One Life.

Moreover, Leakey had become increasingly frustrated at being treated, as he put it, like ‘a sort of tea-boy’. His father’s occasional appearances served only to emphasise his junior status. Recalling the expedition years later, Richard Leakey told Delta Willis: ‘I really didn’t like the Omo project. There were too many chaps ahead of me—all sorts of serious, senior scientists. I was very much on the bottom of the pile’. Ambitious, arrogant and ruthless, what he wanted was control of his own expedition.

A chance event provided him with an opening. On his way back to the Omo Valley by plane after a short trip to Nairobi in August, a huge storm system lay across the normal route along the western shore of the Jade Sea—Lake Turkana—so the pilot diverted to the east side, an area that Leakey had never seen before. Maps showed the region to consist of nothing more than volcanic rock, but from the window Leakey saw what looked like vast stretches of sandstone sediments traversed by eroded gullies, terrain likely to produce fossils. A few days later, borrowing a helicopter that the