“Digging human bones was associated with witchcraft,” he told The Christian Science Monitor in 2009. Then I started to find them.”By the mid-1960s he was working mostly with Louis and Mary’s son, Richard, around Lake Turkana, in northwestern Kenya. Almost immediately, he became Richard’s most trusted adviser, enough so that Richard often left him in charge for long stretches of time when he had work in Nairobi. “He would spend many, many hours sitting under trees, making sure that people in the community understood what was going on,” Louise Leakey, Richard’s daughter and herself a noted paleontologist, said in a phone interview. “He was well known and liked by the international scientists, all the way through to the chief and the local elders on the ground.” (Richard Leakey died in January at 77.)

Source: The North Africa Journal August 12, 2022 12:16 UTC