Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey and his team discovered many prehistoric human fossils at Lake Turkana, Kenya. In this photograph, he is holding near-complete fossil skulls of Homo erectus, left, and Homo habilis, right.
Credit: © Chip Hires, Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Famed scientist, conservationist, and politician Richard Leakey passed away aged 77 on Jan. 2, 2022 at his home outside Nairobi, Kenya. The remarkable fossils of prehistoric human ancestors discovered by Leakey and his colleagues firmly established the origins of humanity in Africa.  

Richard Erskine Frere Leakey was born on Dec. 19, 1944 in Nairobi. He was the son of distinguished British anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, whose excavations at Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania uncovered fossils of an early human ancestor they named Homo habilis. Louis Leakey argued that Homo habilis was one of the earliest types of human beings. Other scientists were skeptical, thinking that our own species likely originated in other regions.  

As a child, Richard grew up at excavation sites in Olduvai Gorge run by his parents. As a rebellious teen, however, Richard Leakey was determined to stay out of the “family business” of searching for fossils of early human ancestors. He dropped out of school and worked for a time leading safaris. While flying his own airplane over a region of northern Kenya around Lake Turkana, he recognized landscapes that likely held abundant fossils. Leading his own team of fossil hunters, Richard discovered several fossils of human ancestors, including a nearly complete skull that he recognized as Homo habilis. This species is now considered by most anthropologists to be one of the earliest types of human beings. Homo habilis lived in Africa about 2 million years ago. 

In 1984, a member of Leakey’s team, Kamoya Kimeu, found an almost complete skeleton of a young man at a site called Nariokotome near Lake Turkana that dates about 1.6 million years ago. The skeleton was classified in the species Homo erectus, a prehistoric human ancestor known from fossils first discovered in the 1800’s in Asia and later in Europe. The well-preserved fossil skeleton demonstrates that Homo erectus had a larger brain compared to Homo habilis, and first appeared in Africa. The more intelligent Homo erectus was able to adapt to new environments and migrate out of the ancestral African homeland.  

From 1968 to 1989, Richard directed the National Museums of Kenya while he and his team continued fieldwork in the Lake Turkana region, discovering many important fossils of human ancestors. From 1990 to 1994, and briefly again in 1998, he headed the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). In that position, he worked to eliminate the illegal killing of Kenyan elephants for their tusks, a source of ivory. In 1995, Leakey helped found a Kenyan political party called Safina, to challenge the ruling Kenya African National Union (Kanu) party.  

Since 2002, Leakey has been a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. There, he led the Turkana Basin Institute responsible for continuing fieldwork in the Lake Turkana region. In 2004 he founded the conservation organization WildlifeDirect and also returned as head of the KWS from 2015 until 2018. 

July 27, 2015

Last Friday, July 24, U.S. President Barack Obama arrived in his father’s homeland of Kenya. It is the first visit to Kenya by a serving president of the United States, but it is not Obama’s first visit. He traveled to Kenya as a law student in 1998.

U.S. President Barack Obama is seen as a child with his Kenyan father in an undated family snapshot from the 1960′s. Credit: Reuters/Landov

On his first night in Kenya, Obama attended a dinner with family members on his father’s side. On Saturday, he met with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Jomo Kenyatta, the first leader of independent Kenya. Presidents Uhuru Kenyatta and Obama discussed economic and business issues, as well as Islamic extremism in Africa. The Islamic militant group al-Shabab has been active and has launched a number of attacks in Kenya. Obama also discussed human rights issues in Kenya.

On Sunday, Obama spoke at a sports arena. His speech encouraged Kenya, but it also touched on things about Kenya that need to change in order for Kenya to move forward. Some of the issues Obama focused on were corruption, rights for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender) people, and women’s rights. About women, Obama stated,  “Treating women and girls as second-class citizens, those are bad traditions,” he said. “They need to change. They’re holding you back.”

President Obama left Kenya for Ethiopia on Sunday. Today, Monday the 27th, he meets with African leaders to try to encourage South Sudan to accept an agreement to end the violence in that country. Since 2013, a civil war in South Sudan has killed thousands of people.

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April 17, 2015.

Archaeologists—scientists who study the past remains of human cultures—who were working in northern Kenya discovered evidence of the world’s oldest human technology. Technology is defined as human inventions, and the term includes tools, techniques, and processes that humans use to survive and prosper. The Kenyan technology found is in the form of 3.3 million-year-old stone tools. Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook  University in New York described the discovery this week at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco. The discovery raises interesting questions about the origins of human technology.

Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya, a site that was peopled by by early humans.
Credit: © Christophe Cerisier, iStockphoto

Harmand and her team discovered the stone tools at a site called Lomekwi, on the western side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The tools were large and crudely made by chipping sharp-edged stone flakes off a large rock using another stone as a hammer. The Lomekwi stone tools are similar to others found at sites in Africa, including Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the first known fossils of an early human ancestor called Homo habilis. This species is considered by most anthropologists to be one of the earliest types of human beings.

What distinguishes Lomekwi from all other sites is its age. The stone tools discovered at Lomekwi are more than 1 million years older than the tools at Olduvai and they are at least 700,000 years older than stone tools from the site of Gona in Ethiopia, discovered in 1996. The 2.6 million-year-old stone tools from Gona had been the oldest known technology until now.

However, scientists point out that he oldest known fossils of Homo habilis are only 2.4 to 2.8 million years old. This suggests that the Lomekwi stone tools were made by an earlier, prehuman ancestor such as Australopithecus afarensis. American anthropologist Donald Johanson discovered fossils of this species in 1974 at Hadar, Ethiopia. Johanson found a partial skeleton of an adult female, the famous “Lucy,” in deposits dating to about 3.2 million years ago. Scientists think that human beings developed from an Australopithecus ancestor. However, they are not sure whether it is A. afarensis or another species that is the direct ancestor of the first humans.

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April 6, 2015

Kenya sent fighter planes into Somalia today to carry out bombing missions at training camps belonging to Islamist jihadists al-Shabab. Both camps were in the Gedo region of Somalia, part of which shares a border with eastern Kenya.

The bombing is seen as a first response to last Thursday’s attack on a Kenyan university. Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, promised to respond to the April 2 attack in “the severest possible way.”

Al-Shabab was formed as a terrorist militant organization in Somalia around 2006. In 2012, the group pledged its allegiance to al Qa’ida. It has launched a number of bombings and attacks in Somalia and neighboring Kenya over the years. Last Thursday, four gunmen from al-Shabab launched a siege that lasted 15 hours at Garissa University College, a school of about 800 students. By the time the attackers were stopped, 148 people from the university were dead, 142 of them students and the others police and security guards. Christian students were targeted in the attack.

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September 23, 2013

Kenyan security forces continue an assault launched yesterday on the Westgate shopping complex in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in an attempt to end a two-day siege by terrorists. More than 1,000 people were inside the mall, Nairobi’s most up-scale shopping complex, when the terrorists stormed it on Saturday, slaughtering dozens of civilians and taking hostages. At least 62 people are known to have died in the attack, and more than 170 others were injured. A Kenyan army spokesperson has announced that security forces have secured much of the shopping center and that only a small number of hostages is believed to remain under the militants’ control. However, the militants are armed with military-grade weaponry and, according to security experts, seem determined to fight to the death.

The Islamist al-Shabab movement has claimed it carried out the attack in retaliation for Kenyan military operations in Somalia. The group, which has killed countless civilians with suicide bombs, has repeatedly threatened attacks in Kenya if the Kenyan government did not pull its troops out of Somalia. There are currently about 4,000 Kenyan troops there as part of an African Union peacekeeping force.

Nairobi, a city of more than 3 million people, is one of Africa's largest and most cosmopolitan cities. It is a center for banking, trade, and other commercial activities. (© Images of Africa Photobank/Alamy Images)

Al-Shabab (Arabic for “youths”) has been active in Somalia since the early 2000′s. It is intent on establishing an Islamic state there under Shar’iah law. Al-Shabab has at various times controlled large sections of southern and central Somalia. In early 2012, Western-backed African Union peacekeeping forces pushed al-Shabab out of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Despite being forced out of the capital, al-Shabab remains in control of smaller towns and large swathes of the countryside.

Terrorism experts believe that al-Shabab has links to the al-Qa’ida cell in Yemen, the Islamic Maghreb terrorist organization in Mali, and the Islamist Boko Haram terrorist group in Nigeria.

The expensive shops and restaurants at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall attracted wealthy Kenyans and expatriates alike. Among the dead were people from Canada, China, France, Ghana, India, and the United Kingdom.

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