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July 17th found Louis not feeling well. To pass time while awaiting the visitors' arrival, Mary decided to survey a site where recent rains had uncovered new fossils, far from where they would dig during filming. She was thrilled and raced back to camp when she spotted several very large teeth still imbedded in what appeared to be an upper jaw of an Australopithecus. Louis firmly believed that today's humans are not directly related to australopithecines and at first was slightly disappointed as he hoped for an early Homo, the maker of the tools they found in abundance wherever they dug.

Looking out over Koobi Fora. Photo courtesy of Steve
Turner, Origins Safaris www.originsafaris.info

Louis's disappointment soon turned to glee. There, in situ, waiting for its many small pieces to be found and pieced together so it could be photographed and shown to the world, was the skull, bony crest down its middle, of a creature who lived about 1,750,000 years ago. He or she who finds gets to name, based on the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, so Louis dubbed him Zinj, an ancient Arabic word for East Africa and short for Zinjanthropus boisei, or "East African Man." The species name was in honor of their long-time benefactor, Charles Boise. Colleague Phillip Tobias nicknamed him "Nutcracker Man" because of gigantic teeth, but little wonder the Leakeys themselves referred to him as "Dear Boy." If Proconsul opened a path for the Leakey's future work, then Zinj exposed a superhighway. His discovery, helped by his re-entry into the daylight being captured on film, led to a fantastic amount of funding in return for exclusive American publishing rights from the National Geographic Society, a collaboration that still continues with the Leakey family. Zinj put the Leakey name in lights on the billboard of the world stage, and as Louis's granddaughter Louise now says, so far as the origin of humans, the 1959 find of Zinj "really put Africa on the map." It also made stars of Louis and Mary. Donald Johanson later wrote, "The Zinj find of 1959 not only made Louis Leakey famous; it also made paleoanthropology fashionable…Human fossils have a special magic…Fossil hominids have always had more clout than fossil clams" (Johanson, 1981, pp. 97, 98).

NOTE: Please check out Louise's dispatches from Koobi Fora in northern Kenya http://www.kfrp.com and, if you can, make a contribution toward the search for our common ancestor.

The Leakeys: A Biography, Mary Bowman-Kruhm. ©2005 by Mary Bowman-Kruhm. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.