Word: leakeys
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Richard does not deny it. Still director of the National Museums of Kenya, he is also a research associate of the recently created International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute...
...anthropologists still look down on Richard Leakey, regarding him as an untrained upstart without proper academic credentials. But most of his colleagues believe he has more than made up in acquired knowledge for any lack of academic initials to place after his name. Yale's Pilbeam calls Leakey the "organizing genius" of modern paleoanthropology (the study of fossil hominids). Mary Leakey, a vigorous, cigar-smoking woman of 64 who still puts in eight hours a day exploring Olduvai, is also impressed. She says her son "is rather better than Louis was. I'm quite proud...
These days Leakey spends most of his time in Nairobi, mired in administrative work at the museum. But he still longs to be out in the field and at every opportunity loads his second wife, the former Meave Epps (his first marriage ended in divorce), and their two small children into his four-seat Cessna and flies out for a short stay at Koobi Fora...
Next summer, however, Leakey will lead a team to search south of Lake Turkana at a site called Suguta. The region is roadless, and he will have to go in, as in the old days, by donkey and camel. The discomforts may be worth it; a geological survey of the area shows fossil-bearing sediments between 5 million and 9 million years old, laid down in a period that has so far yielded few clues about the ascent...
...Leakey's colleagues are making plans of their own in the continuing search. Prevented by war from continuing their work in Ethiopia, Johanson and Taieb plan to look for relics of early man in Arabia, where geological and climatic conditions are similar to those in the Afar region where Lucy was found. Pilbeam will soon go back to Pakistan in search of "new surprises." Simons is heading for Egypt in search of fossils that could enable him to trace man's roots back beyond Dryopithecus...