Louise Leakey
Dr. Louise Leakey, daughter of Richard and Meave Leakey, is a paleontologist, National Geographic Explorer at Large, Explorers Club Fellow, and Stony Brook professor exploring human origins.
Pilot
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Winemaker
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Fossil Hunter
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Pilot • Winemaker • Fossil Hunter •
More about Louise
Born and raised in East Africa, Louise Leakey was destined to carry on her family’s legacy—searching for human origins in the fossil-rich Turkana Basin that stretches from Kenya into southern Ethiopia. The daughter of Meave and Richard Leakey, and granddaughter of Louis and Mary Leakey, at age five, Louise unknowingly found her first important fossil—a tooth from a 17-million-year-old ape. By age 12, Louise was driving the family’s Land Rover to pick up water for the team. At age 18, she learned how to fly—a skill that would prove useful for much of her life in the remote north of Kenya.
While Louise was away at college in England, her father had a devastating plane crash. She returned Kenya to manage the field work. Six years later, launching her career, the mother-daughter team discovered a 3.5-million-year-old skull believed to be a branch of very early humans. Today she leads a team that continuing to make ground-breaking discoveries that shed light on our origins.
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Louise currently directs Kenya’s paleo-anthropological expeditions of the Koobi Fora Research Project. A true conservation family, Louise is married to Emmanuel de Merode, who directs the Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, home to endangered mountain gorillas. Louise earned a PhD in Biology from University College London. In addition to field work, she also serves as a Research Professor in Anthropology at SUNY Stony Brook (the academic partner of the Turkana Basin Institute) and is a Research Associate at the National Museums of Kenya.
Speaking Topics
Science
Exploration
Culture
Watch Louise in action
Presentations
Digging for Humanity’s Origins
The burning questions that consume Louise Leakey—born in Africa and heir to the famed Leakey dynasty of fossil seekers—is: “Why are we, Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of the many other human ancestors that existed going back some six million years, and who were these ancestors from where we all came?”
“What the fossil record does is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Earth, and—like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently—our time on planet Earth is also finite.”
– Louise Leakey