Ground-Breaking Discovery Conservationist Passed Away

Posting on Twitter, the Leakey Foundation wrote of its “deep sadness” at his death, adding: “He was a visionary whose great contributions to human origins and wildlife conservation will never be forgotten.”

According to report, Kenyan conservationist found oldest near-complete human skeleton in 1984, dating from 1.5m years ago.

The celebrated Kenyan conservationist and fossil hunter Richard Leakey, whose ground-breaking discoveries helped prove that humankind evolved in Africa, has died aged 77.

The president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, announced Leakey’s death with “deep sorrow”.

The famed palaeoanthropologist had remained energetic into his 70s, despite bouts of skin cancer and kidney and liver disease.

Leakey was born in Nairobi on 19 December 1944 – and it was perhaps inevitable that he would become a fossil hunter given his parents were Louis and Mary Leakey, perhaps the world’s most famous discoverers of ancestral hominids.

lthough Leakey initially tried his hand at safari guiding, aged 23 – and with having no formal archaeological training – he won a research grant to dig on the shores of northern Kenya’s Lake Turkana.

During the 1970s he led expeditions that shed new light on the scientific understanding of human evolution, with the discovery of the skulls of Homo habilis (1.9m years old) in 1972 and Homo erectus (1.6m years old) in 1975.

He made the cover of Time magazine posing with a Homo habilis mock-up, under the headline How Man Became Man.

But it was in 1981, when he fronted the landmark seven-part BBC TV series The Making of Mankind, that he gained wider fame.

Just a few years later, in 1984, he would enjoy his most famous fossil find: the uncovering of a near-complete Homo erectus skeleton during one of his digs. Nicknamed Turkana Boy, it dated from approximately 1.5m years ago and is the most complete fossil skeleton of a human ancestor ever found.

During this decade Leakey became one of the world’s leading voices against the then legal global ivory trade. In 1989 the Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi appointed him to lead the national wildlife agency, which became the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).