Famous Anthropologists


THE LEAKEY FAMILY

Without the groundbreaking--and backbreaking--efforts of Louis, Mary and Richard, the story of how we evolved would still be largely untold

Louis Leakey's enthusiasm for Africa and the search for earliest man were infectious. Speaking before a packed lecture hall in his staccato-like voice, punctuated by rapid inhales, he cast a spell, making each listener believe he was speaking only to him or her. His following in America was cultlike. Consumed with devotion and swept up in his charisma, many developed a desire to follow somehow in his footsteps, to please him.

No wonder Leakey became the patriarch of a family that dominated anthropology as no family has dominated a scientific field before or since. Not only did Louis, his wife Mary and their second son Richard make the key discoveries that shaped our understanding of human origins, but they also inspired a generation of researchers (myself included) to pick up where they left off.

I recall with great fondness my first visit to Nairobi in 1970 when Louis ceremoniously led me to the room housing the crown jewels of human evolution. Every fossil took on a mythical cast as he waxed eloquent about how it revealed some magic moment of our origins. Here he was, the grand master, sharing his passion, knowledge and intuition with a new disciple. He was often like that: generous, open, supportive, always trying to win new converts to his way of working, his way of interpreting the past.

Born in Kenya of English missionaries, Louis was initiated by tribal elders into the native Kikuyu society. As a young man he was adventurous, impulsive, driven, ruggedly handsome and romantically African. Fresh out of Cambridge, Louis set out to prove Darwin's theory that Africa was humankind's homeland--and to discover evidence for his own belief that true man, Homo, had a very ancient origin.

In 1933, when Louis met and fell in love with 20-year-old Mary Nicol, he already had a family, but in flagrant disregard of the social norms of the time, he divorced. The synergy of Louis and Mary's union was obvious from the outset. In contrast to Louis' charming, gregarious, outgoing nature, Mary was shy, reserved, socially uncomfortable and, in her own words, not very fond of other people. Mary preferred to carefully evaluate scientific evidence before reaching any conclusions; Louis, on the other hand, was often impulsive and cavalier in his proclamations. Rigorous in her approach, intensely focused and remarkably diligent, Mary quickly set new standards in the study of African prehistory, culminating in her stunning monographs on the archaeology of Olduvai Gorge.

It was Mary's 1959 discovery of the Zinjanthropus cranium at Olduvai that captured worldwide attention and made the Leakeys a household name. Building on this find, Louis and Mary attracted a multidisciplinary team of specialists to work at Olduvai and launched the modern science of paleoanthropology, the study of human origins.

It was then, after decades of the Leakeys' working in isolation and operating on shoestring budgets, that the National Geographic Society agreed to support and promote the "Leakey legacy." Louis was, for Geographic, everything it could have wished for in an African adventurer. He was the self-proclaimed white African.

Following the success of Zinjanthropus, Louis began spending less and less time at Olduvai, which became Mary's domain. For most of the next 25 years she worked and lived there with her staff, her dogs and selected visitors. Until his death in 1972, Louis visited occasionally but spent most of his time traveling around the world, lecturing and raising funds to support an ever expanding list of research projects. Most notable were the field studies he launched of the living great apes: Jane Goodall's chimps, Dian Fossey's gorillas and Birute Galdikas' orangs.

In 1978 Mary made what may have been her greatest find. Her team was re-exploring a site in Tanzania called Laetoli--40 years after Louis had incorrectly assumed that the absence of tools there implied that hominid fossils would not be found--when they discovered a trail of remarkably clear ancient hominid footprints impressed and preserved in volcanic ash. It was a stunning glimpse of the world 3.6 million years ago. If only Louis had lived to see it.

A detailed scientific study of the Laetoli hominid fossils confirmed that they belonged to a new hominid species, best represented by the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton I had discovered four years earlier at Hadar, Ethiopia. When I presented these findings in May 1978 at a Nobel symposium in Sweden, Mary had already agreed to be one of the coauthors on the scientific paper defining the new species, Australopithecus afarensis. A few months later, however, when the paper was being printed, she cabled me demanding removal of her name. I respected her wishes and had the title page redone. Like Louis, she did not believe Australopithecus was our ancestor; if her finds at Laetoli were our ancestors, they had to be Homo.

It was a blustery, wintry afternoon in 1970 at the University of Chicago when I first met Louis and Mary's son Richard. He had just completed a preliminary presentation on his new finds from Lake Turkana (then Lake Rudolf). I told him I would be in Nairobi the next summer and wanted to see his exciting hominid fossils. A year younger than I, he had chosen, after becoming disenchanted with the safari business, to follow in his parents' footsteps. It appeared that he too possessed the "Leakey luck" and was well on the way to stardom in paleoanthropology.

Our first meeting in Nairobi was cordial, and Richard dazzled me with remarkable specimens; a friendship was simmering. Beginning preparations for my research in Ethiopia's Afar region, I was a frequent visitor to Nairobi, and Richard offered suggestions and appeared supportive of my efforts. But our conversation always had a dimension of competition, and even though we offered each other advice, in retrospect it was as if we were looking for chinks in each other's armor.

Both of us were strong in character and ultimately, almost inevitably, this led to our estrangement in 1981. We were the Young Turks of anthropology in those days, staunchly defending our interpretations of human evolution. Perhaps now, with the mellowing of age, it is time to break the silence.

Much like his father, Richard has strong opinions and is often hasty to make pronouncements about his discoveries. This was especially true when he presented, in 1972, a Homo skull that he believed was 2.9 million years old. Adhering to his father's belief in very early Homo, this find, older than all Australopithecus fossils then known, was a welcome and stunning endorsement of Louis' views. Louis and Richard had been feuding over museum matters, and this discovery brought them together again in a final meeting shortly before Louis died. He spent his last days comforted by the knowledge that he had been proved correct. Since then, however, the skull has been correctly dated to 1.8 million years; despite Louis and Richard's objections, most anthropologists today believe Australopithecus is indeed one of our ancestors.

Richard, meanwhile, continued his rise to prominence. Fossil finds such as the astonishingly complete 1.6 million-year-old skeleton of an African Homo erectus (Homo ergaster to some) and the Black Skull have added immeasurably to our knowledge of human origins. His career benefited from best-selling books, a television series on human evolution and popular lecture tours.

Paleoanthropology has not been his only passion, however. He will probably be best remembered in Africa for founding an opposition political party in Kenya in 1995, after which he suffered public humiliation, including being beaten with leather whips. But Richard has proved astonishingly resilient. Even after a life-saving kidney transplant in 1979 (a gift from his estranged brother Philip) and the partial loss of both legs in a 1993 plane crash, he continues to exude confidence.

In 1989 President Daniel arap Moi appointed Richard head of what is now the Kenya Wildlife Service. Richard raised hundreds of millions of dollars and revamped Kenya's approach to wildlife conservation, heavily arming antipoaching units and instituting a controversial edict permitting the shooting of poachers on sight. He resigned in 1994 amid politically motivated accusations of corruption, racism and mismanagement--only to be reinstated by Moi 4 1/2 years later.

Nevertheless, the Leakeys will forever be synonymous with paleoanthropology and even today show all signs of being alive, well and contributing productively to the field. Richard's wife Meave, a trained zoologist, and their eldest daughter Louise are currently leading teams to northern Kenya, where hominids in excess of 4 million years old are being found. The stage is set for the first family of anthropology to continue well into the next century.

Talk to Richard Leakey Sunday, March 28, 10 a.m. E.T., on AOL (Keyword: AOL Live)


1933 Louis and Mary meet in England. They will marry in 1936
1944 Richard is born in Kenya
1959 Mary finds Zinjanthropus
1964 Louis unveils Homo habilis, "handy man," who made stone
tools
1972 Richard finds 1.8 million-year-old skull at Koobi Fora;
Louis dies in London on Oct. 3, at 69
1978 Mary's Laetoli footprint trail
1984 "Turkana Boy"; Mary retires
1985 "Black Skull" at Lake Turkana
1989 Richard abandons fossil hunting for wildlife conservation
1996 Mary dies in Nairobi, Dec. 9, at 83



FRANZ BOAZ

Franz Boaz was born July 9, 1858, Minden, Westphalia, Prussia [Germany] d. Dec. 22, 1942, New York, N.Y., U.S. German-born American anthropologist of the early 20th century, the founder of the relativistic, culture-centred school of anthropology that became dominant in the 20th century.

During his tenure at Columbia University in New York City (1899-1942), he developed one of the foremost departments of anthropology in the United States. Boas was a specialist in North American Indian cultures and languages, but he was, in addition, the organizer of a profession and the great teacher of a number of scientists who developed anthropology in the United States, including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits, and Edward Sapir.

Boas was the son of a merchant. He was of delicate health as a child and spent much of his time with books. His parents were free-thinking liberals who held to the ideals of the Revolutions of 1848. Although Jewish, he grew up feeling completely German. From the age of five he took an interest in the natural sciences--botany, geography, zoology, geology, and astronomy. While studying at the Gymnasium in Minden, he became deeply interested in the history of culture.

He followed his various intellectual bents in his course of studies at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, taking his Ph.D. in physics and geography at Kiel in 1881.

After a year's military service Boas continued his studies in Berlin, then undertook a year-long scientific expedition to Baffin Island in 1883-84. Firmly interested now in human cultures, he took posts in an ethnological museum in Berlin and on the faculty of geography at the University of Berlin.

In 1886, on his way back from a visit to the Kwakiutl and other tribes of British Columbia (which became a lifelong study), he stopped in New York City and decided to stay. He found a position as an editor of the magazine Science .

Boas' first teaching position was at the newly founded Clark University (Worcester, Mass.) in 1889. Next, he spent a period in Chicago, where he assisted in the preparation of the anthropological exhibitions at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and held a post at the Field Museum of Natural History.

In 1896 he became lecturer in physical anthropology and in 1899 professor of anthropology at Columbia University. From 1896 to 1905 he was also curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; in that capacity he directed and edited the reports submitted by the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, an investigation of the relationships between the aboriginal peoples of Siberia and of North America.

From his earliest years in America, Boas was an innovative and prodigiously productive scholar, contributing equally to statistical physical anthropology, descriptive and theoretical linguistics, and American Indian ethnology, including important studies of folklore and art. His personal research contributions alone would have given him an important place in the history of anthropology, but he also exerted enormous influence as a teacher.

By the turn of the century, national leadership in anthropology was firmly in Boas' hands. In 1906, at the age of 48, he was presented with the festschrift (volume of tributes), usually awarded by his colleagues to a scholar nearing retirement. The 36 years that followed were no less productive, influential, or honoured. Boas established the International Journal of American Linguistics, was one of the founders of the American Anthropological Association, and served as president (1931) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 1911 Boas published The Mind of Primitive Man, a series of lectures on culture and race. It was often referred to in the 1920s by those who were opposed to new U.S. immigration restrictions based on presumed racial differences. In the 1930s the Nazis in Germany burned the book and rescinded his Ph.D. degree, which Kiel University had in 1931 ceremonially reconfirmed. Boas updated and enlarged the book in 1937. Other books by Boas include Primitive Art (1927) and Race, Language and Culture (1940).

The revolutionary significance of Boas' work can only be understood in terms of the differing beliefs of anthropologists about man. Almost all anthropologists have almost always believed that the human species is one; but not as many of them believed in Boas' day that the races of mankind show equally the human capacity to develop cultural forms.

It is partly because of Boas' influence that the proposition is now almost universally accepted that every surviving population large enough to have a distribution of individual differences shows equally the human capacity to develop cultural forms, and that differences in outcome are attributed by anthropologists to historic "cultural" rather than genetic factors. < p>Within this common framework there have sometimes been differences in view as to the actual attainments of particular peoples. Some anthropologists, often calling themselves "evolutionary," argue that some peoples have achieved "higher" states of culture, leaving behind--at least temporarily--other peoples.

They believe that the differences between "civilized" and "primitive" peoples are the result of environmental, cultural, and historical circumstances. Other anthropologists, frequently called cultural relativists, argue that the evolutionary view is ethnocentric, deriving from a human disposition to characterize groups other than one's own as inferior, and that all surviving human groups have evolved equally but in different ways.

Franz Boas was of the second persuasion.

Since British and U.S. anthropologists in the last third of the 19th century were not particularly disposed to this view, Boas' success in making it overwhelmingly dominant was all the more remarkable. While he had originally assumed as a natural scientist that universal laws must exist that would explain how different peoples have wound up with their characteristic ways of life, he concluded that the problem was too complex for any general solution.

Laws of cultural causation, he argued, had to be discovered rather than assumed.

Boas' view requires the anthropologist to be capable of understanding all factors that might influence the histories of peoples. Thus, to assert that cultural differences are not the result of biological differences, one must know something of biology; and to see the interrelations of man and his environment, the anthropologist must understand such things as migration, nutrition, child-raising customs, and disease, as well as the movements and interrelations of peoples and their cultures.

Anthropology then becomes holistic and eclectic, involved in any field of science or scholarship that appears relevant to a particular problem.



MARGARET MEAD

Margaret Mead was born on Dec. 16, 1901, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S. d. Nov. 15, 1978, New York, N.Y. American anthropologist whose great fame owed as much to the force of her personality and her outspokenness as it did to the quality of her scientific work.

Mead entered DePauw University in 1919 and transferred to Barnard College a year later. She graduated from Barnard in 1923 and entered the graduate school of Columbia University, where she studied with and was greatly influenced by anthropologists Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict (a lifelong friend). Mead received an M.A. in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1929. In 1925, during the first of her many field trips to the South Seas, she gathered material for the first of her 23 books, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928; new ed., 1968), a perennial best-seller and a characteristic example of her reliance on observation rather than statistics for data. The book clearly indicates her belief in cultural determinism, a position that caused some later 20th-century anthropologists to question both the accuracy of her observations and the soundness of her conclusions.

Her other works include Growing Up in New Guinea (1930; new ed., 1975), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935; reprinted, 1968), Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942, with Gregory Bateson, to whom she was married in 1936-51), Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), and A Rap on Race (1971, with James Baldwin).

During her many years with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, she successively served as assistant curator (1926-42), associate curator (1942-64), curator of ethnology (1964-69), and curator emeritus (1969-78). Her contributions to science received special recognition when, at the age of 72, she was elected to the presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1979 she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States's highest civilian honour.

As an anthropologist, Mead was best known for her studies of the nonliterate peoples of Oceania, especially with regard to various aspects of psychology and culture, the cultural conditioning of sexual behaviour, natural character, and culture change. As a celebrity, she was most notable for her forays into such far-ranging topics as women's rights, childrearing, sexual morality, nuclear proliferation, race relations, drug abuse, population control, environmental pollution, and world hunger.

Some of her other works are Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (1949; new ed., 1975), Anthropology: A Human Science (1964), Culture and Commitment (1970), Ruth Benedict (1974), a biography of that anthropologist, and an autobiography of her own early years, Blackberry Winter (1972). Letters from the Field (1977) is a selection of Mead's correspondence written during the Samoa expedition.



DIAN FOSSEY

Fossey, Dian (1932-1985), American zoologist, whose field studies of wild gorillas in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda and Zaire served to dispel many myths about the violent and aggressive nature of gorillas.

Born in San Francisco, Fossey graduated from San Jose State College in 1954 with a degree in occupational therapy; she then worked at a children's hospital in Kentucky for several years. Inspired by the writings of American zoologist George B. Schaller, Fossey traveled to Africa in 1963. There she observed mountain gorillas in the wild and visited the British anthropologist Louis Leakey.

Leakey, believing that studies of great apes would shed light on the subject of human evolution, encouraged Fossey to undertake a long-term field study of gorillas. Fossey was an astute and patient observer of gorilla behavior. She knew each individual in her study area, and she came to regard the gorillas as gentle, social animals.

Her study site, Karisoke, became an international center for gorilla research when she established the Karisoke Research Center in 1967.

Fossey received a Ph.D. in zoology from Cambridge University in 1974. Her book, Gorillas in the Mist (1983), recounts observations from her years of field research. Fossey spent 22 years studying the ecology and behavior of mountain gorillas.

In 1985 she was found murdered at her campsite. Some authorities believe she was murdered in retaliation for her efforts to stop the poaching of gorillas and other animals in Africa. Due largely to Fossey's research and conservation work, mountain gorillas are now protected by the government of Rwanda and by the international conservation and scientific communities.



RUTH BENEDICT (1887-1948)

In 1919 Ruth Benedict began taking courses, first at Columbia University with John Dewey and then at the New School for Social Research with Elsie Clews Parsons whose course in ethnology of the sexes kindled Benedict's interest in anthropology. Under the guidance of Franz Boas, Benedict received her doctorate in 1923 from Columbia, where she remained throughout her career. In 1948 she was promoted to full professor in the Faculty of Political Science, the first woman to achieve such status.

Benedict's fieldwork was done in California among the Serrano and with the Zuñi, Cochiti, and Pima in the Southwest. Student training trips took her to the Mescalero Apache in Arizona and Blackfoot in the Northwest. From her work in the field, se veral of her books were developed: Tales of the Cochiti Indians (New York: 1931); Zuñi Mythology (New York: 1935); and Patterns of Culture (Boston: 1934), which became a best seller and influenced American life in that it explained the idea of "culture" to the layperson.

During World War II, Benedict worked for the Office of War Information, applying anthropological methods to the study of contemporary cultures. A study of Japan was her final assignment. The outgrowth of her work on Japan for the OWI was her book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (New York: 1946), which became a bestseller at the time and, ultimately, a classic work in the study of Japanese culture. It is still in print today.

After Ruth Benedict's death on 17 September 1948, her executor and sole legatee, Dr. Ruth Valentine, did preliminary sorting of Benedict's professional and personal papers located in her home and office. The papers were sent to Margaret Mead's office at the American Museum of Natural History where they were further arranged into categories by Benedict's friend and former undergraduate student, Marie Eichelberger, for use by Mead in An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (Boston: 1959).



EDWARD SAPIR (1884�1939)

Sapir was an American linguist and anthropologist, b. Pomerania. Sapir was brought to the United States in 1889. After teaching at the Univ. of California and the Univ. of Pennsylvania, he served (1910�25) as chief of the division of anthropology of the Canadian National Museum. He was professor of anthropology at the Univ. of Chicago (1925�31), and of anthropology and linguistics at Yale from 1931 until his death. With his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897�1941) he developed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, arguing that the limits of language restrict the scope of possible thought and that every language recognizes peculiar sets of distinctions - e.g., Eskimo and its rich vocabulary for different kinds of snow.





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