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Virginia Morell’s comprehensive biography of the Leakey family provides many candid insights.

Efforts to identify the culprits involved in the Piltdown forgery still continue, more than fifty years after Joseph Weiner, Kenneth Oakley and Wilfred Le Gros Clark exposed it in 1953 : ‘The solution of the Piltdown problem’, Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History, Geology 2 (3) : 139–146 (1953). Brian Gardiner restated the case against Martin Hinton in 2003. Hinton died in 1961. Charles Dawson died in 1916.

CHAPTER 7

Richard Leakey’s output of publications was as prolific as his father’s. His early exploits were all the more remarkable because for ten years he suffered from a debilitating kidney disease. The disease was diagnosed in 1968, but it was not until 1979, after his brother Philip offered to donate one of his kidneys, that he underwent a successful transplant. In 1989, he left the field of palaeoanthropology to take up an appointment as head of the Kenyan government’s wildlife department, with the mandate to root out corruption and poaching. The poaching menace was significantly reduced, but in the process Leakey offended many local politicians and officials. (See Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya’s Elephants, Macmillan, London [2001]). In 1993, he lost both his legs after a plane crash. Sabotage was suspected but never proved. In 1995, he helped launch an opposition party. After pressure from international donor organisations, President Daniel Arap Moi appointed him cabinet secretary and head of the civil service in 1997. He resigned in 2001.

Roger Lewin deals with the KBS tuff controversy in Bones of Contention (1997). The complex stratigraphy of the Turkana Basin was eventually sorted out by Frank Brown, an American geologist who made an extensive study of it in the 1980s. Brown describes tuffs as ‘thin slices of time’. After each volcanic eruption, ashes that ride on the wind accumulate on the landscape, forming layers that range from a few inches thick to fifty feet. In some cases—as at Olduvai—the tuff consists of a relatively orderly layer cake which can be dated without much difficulty. But geologists investigating the tuff at East Turkana found ‘a mess’. Ashfalls there—numbering in all about seventy—were mixed with volcanic ash brought down by rivers and streams from the Ethiopian highlands. Brown solved the problem by using a new technique that enabled each tuff to be identified by its unique geochemical ‘fingerprint’.

Virginia Morell examines in detail Richard Leakey’s relationships with Donald Johanson and Tim White. Delta Willis writes vividly about Leakey’s exploits in The Hominid Gang (1989). Meave Leakey’s comments about Richard are taken from an interview she gave in June 2004, published by the Academy of Achievement, Washington, DC.

CHAPTERS 8, 9, 10 AND 11

Lewis Nesbitt, or Ludovico Mariano Nesbitt, as he was otherwise known, was an Italian-born mining engineer of British descent. The U.S. edition of his account of his Afar journey was called: Hell-Hole of Creation: The Exploration of the Abyssinian Danakil (1934).

Maurice Taieb was the first scientist to discover the importance of Hadar, but he soon found himself shunted aside by Donald Johanson, who spoke openly of his determination to become as famous as Richard Leakey. In an interview with Virginia Morell in 1986, Taieb recalled that one day Johanson had asked him whether he thought it possible for him to become as famous as Richard Leakey, as he had neither a famous mother, nor a famous father, nor a famous family name. Taieb remarked: ‘I think he decided that since he could not be a Leakey, he had to beat them; he had to be against them’. Indeed, the dust jacket of Johanson’s book Lucy (1981) boasts of how he had mounted the ‘first real and successful challenge to the Leakey dynasty’.

As a graduate student, Tim White spent three seasons from 1974 to 1976 working at Richard Leakey’s Turkana base. In 1975, with Richard Leakey’s encouragement, he also began