A family and the past
Nicholas Harman
ANCESTRAL PASSIONS by Virginia Morell Simon & Schuster, £20, pp. 638 The index lists 27 Leakeys, the Leakey Foundation for Research Related to Man's Origin, Richard Leakey & Associates (a company) and the Leakey-Harper Draw- ing-Machine. Yet the most important crea- tures in this good, long, serious book have names like Number 1470, Australopithecus boisei and Turkana Boy. They have been dead for controversial numbers of millions of years, bits of them have been found in desert gullies and crannies in Kenya and thereabouts — and some of them may have been, more or less, 'people', whose descen- dants invented God, wrote King Lear, ran the Third Reich, and walk in our very own shoes.
The original Leakeys were sent to East Africa a century ago by the Church Missionary Society, to get the incipient colony ready for settlement. Louis Leakey (1903-1972) claimed as a young man: 'I was born and bred among the Kikuyu tribe and speak their language better than I do, English'. He served his adopted people as well as he knew how. He was a spy for the colonial government, and interpreter at the peculiar trial of Jomo Kenyatta, who emerged from prison to become Kenya's first president and, with some grandeur, forgave his former oppressors. Above all, Louis collected fossil bones of primaeval apes, and identified some of them as mankind's ancestors.
Louis's son Richard has done less for scholarship but more for his country. He organised research, established the Nation- al Museums of Kenya, and toured the world raising money and winning friends. Then Kenyatta's second-rate successor, Daniel arap Moi, picked him to clean up the rackets that were wrecking the lucrative game-parks. Richard did the job so well that he fell out with officials up to and including the President. In 1993 his light aircraft mysteriously lost power just after take-off, and in the crash his skull was cracked and he lost both his legs. That did not stop his clean-up campaign; last year he founded a new opposition political party, and was promptly beaten up by semi- official thugs.
Virginia Morell does not go into those recent dramas. Her book stops in 1989, when Richard left the museums. Perhaps (but there is no hint of it) she was asked to lay off the dangerous areas. However that may be, she finds palaeoanthropology more interesting than politics or the personalities of the adulterers, spies, quarrellers, fund- raisers, crowd-pleasers and risk-takers who throng her pages. Family rows, the meat of so many biographies, are to her battles in scientific wars. She seems embarrassed by, and does nothing to clarify, a bizarre con- sequence of Richard's efforts to promote African scientists — the allegation that the first Kenyan director of the Louis Leakey Memorial Institute tried to bring his boss down with Luo tribal magic.
She believes the Leakeys proved beyond reasonable doubt that the transition from ape into something recognisably human took place in East Africa. (She roughly dis- misses the claim that 'Lucy' — named by a rival, American fossil-hunter after a Beat- les song — is the Eve from whom we are all descended.) Especially, she describes in intriguing detail the way the fossil-hunters do their work, in dreadful country, under the scalding sun, on their knees with a den- tist's pick and a fine brush, short of money, and water, and comfort of any kind.
Morell explains the chances, and the sharp-eyed trackers' skills, that lead to dis- coveries, and tells how tiny shards of what was once bone are speculatively assembled into skulls and hips and ape-shaped mandibles. She argues that Mary Leakey, mother of Richard, was at least as good at this as the men. Only as part of the scientif- ic quest does she show (for example) that Louis Leakey was a wicked old lecher whose bait for young woman was the chance to investigate chimpanzees.
The author is, perhaps, a bit of a puritan. But the science is intriguing. No disputes are as bitter as academic ones, or as tan- gled as those about fossils; the wonderful Piltdown fraud, after all, deceived all the top people in the business for 40 years. The fossil-hunters of East Africa play to the gallery where the people with money sit, and stories about man's ancestry open the fattest cheque-books. Evolutionary evidence that may be just as important — a bug-eyed hippopotamus, dozens of extinct sorts of pigs, crucial bits of dull geology are neglected in the rush to impose a taxonomy upon the scant remains of early primates.
Don't worry dear, it's probably just puppy fat.' From mere fragments of brain-case Louis Leakey used to name whole species, assigning them to genera that were quite soon shown not to have existed. The age of fossils may be, and by the Leakeys and their competitors often has been, guessed wrongly by millions of years. The evolu- tionary questions are not settled yet, not by a long chalk; and the methods that produce the answers are hotly disputed among the learned. It is all good, dirty, scientific fun, with more to come.
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