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Interactive graphic: Timeline of human evolution

Richard Leakey, one of the famous family of palaeoanthropologists, quit the field 20 years ago. He went on to fight Kenya’s poachers and found a political party. But as Colin Barras found when he met Leakey during a rare trip to the UK, some things don’t change

HE LOOKS impatient, like a slightly older, more restless version of Indiana Jones, only trapped in the foyer of a hotel near Edinburgh Castle rather than some exotic citadel. But this is Richard Leakey, a member of the clan whose name is synonymous with palaeoanthropology. And while he may have quit the field some time ago, its rows still touch a nerve.

“Being somewhat of a curmudgeon, what does an odd population of mini-hominins on an isolated island really tell us about us? You could almost say, so what?” Does Leakey really mean to be that dismissive of the high-profile debate over Homo floresiensis – better known as the “Hobbit”? The fossils are not widespread, he says: “We’re talking about a very few individuals, and it certainly has no role in our own evolutionary story.”

Tough talk, and revealing of the extent to which Leakey stands apart from his erstwhile peers. The tiny 12,000-year-old hominin fossils turned up on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, and have been causing trouble ever since. There are two conflicting positions on their origin: they are the remains of diseased modern humans, or they represent a distinct species. Leakey has just suggested a third view: from the standpoint of human evolution, it doesn’t much matter either way.

Leakey quit palaeoanthropology in the late 1980s, going on to conservation and then to politics in his native Kenya. Human fossils were never his whole life, and he wonders how much they matter to most people. “Are they really interested in human origins? I suppose they are. But it wouldn’t be the top conversation topic at the dinner table.” He points to a newspaper lying on the table. It’s devoted to Raptorex, a pint-sized forerunner of Tyrannosaurus. “I think dinosaurs are much more interesting to the average person.”

If most people are not enthused by human fossils, neither, by all accounts, was the young Leakey. Despite – or maybe because of – his famous parents, Louis and Mary, Leakey left school at 16 and began a safari business. But as the sixties swung on, he found himself drawn to fossil hunting, first for fun at Lake Natron in Tanzania and the Omo valley in Ethiopia, then in earnest from 1969, with various expeditions to Lake Turkana in Kenya.

“I went to the National Geographic Society in 1967 and said that I thought Turkana had huge potential, but very few people at the time agreed – including my father,” Leakey recalls. His powers of persuasion earned him a $20,000 grant, and they were vindicated by a wealth of finds over a 20-year period, including a near-complete skeleton of a young Homo erectus which his team nicknamed Turkana Boy.

Forty years on, Leakey is still proud of his Turkana work, and annoyed when it is ignored. Earlier this year, Science – and 91av – felt the notoriously rough edge of his pen over what he considered uncritical reporting of a new find. An international team discovered a set of 1.5-million-year-old footprints near the lake, and suggested that they had been left by Homo erectus, widely regarded as a direct ancestor of modern humans. “There was absolutely no basis for that,” Leakey complains. The fossil feet that are needed to confirm a match are vanishingly rare in the fossil record: Turkana Boy, for example, is missing his feet. “At that interval at Lake Turkana, there were certainly three contemporary bipedal anthropoids. That’s not speculation – we’ve got drawers full of them,” Leakey adds.

“Leakey is still proud of his fossil-hunting expeditions at Lake Turkana in Kenya”

He chastised everyone concerned in 91av‘s letters pages (“the version published was a lot kinder than my original draft!”) – and his letter led eventually to this interview.

He is fiercely protective of work carried out under the Leakey name – his wife, Meave, and daughter Louise are active – as he is quick to note when conversation turns to a much older hominin, Australopithecus afarensis. In 1979, Leakey and palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson, now at Arizona State University, made the front page of The New York Times with their feud over the evolutionary position of afarensis, known as “Lucy” after the best-preserved example. Johanson was sure Lucy was a direct ancestor of modern humans; Leakey felt she probably lay on a side branch.

An analysis of the afarensis jaw published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports Leakey, but does this come closer to resolving the old dispute? He sidesteps the issue: “Three or four years ago, my wife discovered and published about a rather poor skull – a fragment she called Kenyanthropus.” The skull appears to be evidence that a distinct hominin was alive at the same time as afarensis. “Now with the exception, I think, of one researcher, everyone has agreed that Kenyanthropus stands as something entirely different from afarensis. And yet the analysis you’re talking about doesn’t even mention it!”

I wonder aloud if dismissing potentially key evidence reflects an underlying problem in the science. “One hears so much criticism of the field for being slack. I’ve always tried to defend that. But there are times when you struggle to justify some of these reports.”

It’s ironic that Leakey, who famously lacks formal training, finds himself defending colleagues’ scientific rigour: he almost quit in the early 1980s over what he said were unscientific practices by some of his peers. “I got extremely discouraged by the vindictiveness over the afarensis issue. And I was going through a bad health issue – a kidney transplant – where one is prone to depression.”

Although professional friends persuaded him to stick with his work at Turkana for a few more years, in 1988 the Kenyan government asked him to head its wildlife conservation department to combat poaching. “I took the opportunity without a minute’s hesitation.”

I suggest that even there Leakey displayed a knack for making headlines. “The thing that most excites people is that I ordered a shoot-to-kill policy. But I didn’t.” In fact, he says, the policy was his predecessor’s, “but he hadn’t anything to shoot with”. Leakey armed the country’s rangers. “In the year before I took over I think we’d lost something like 30 rangers and I think they’d injured one poacher. In my first six months, I think we lost five of our side and about 17 of the other. And after a year nobody on either side was being killed because the poachers had gone.”

They’re back now, he admits, though it’s not just poachers that threaten Kenya’s wildlife. Locals have started lacing cattle carcasses with poison to kill lions that threaten their livestock. His charitable organisation, WildlifeDirect, is leading the fight against poisoning.

Leakey set it up in 2004 after quitting the state-run Kenya Wildlife Service. “I left out of principle over corruption. I’d raised $150 million, and there was too much official interest in helping me spend it.” For most of the 1990s he was in and out of favour with Kenya’s rulers. At his most rebellious he set up a new political party, Safina, and won a seat in parliament. But he quit, again in protest over corruption.

Arguments with colleagues, whether in palaeontology, wildlife or politics, seem to have prompted many Leakey resignations. “I’m very intolerant of people who don’t show consistency of integrity,” he says.

Leakey is off to Canada after the UK, to raise funds for another of his projects, the , which he set up in 2007. As finds from Turkana rolled in during the 1980s, a new palaeontology museum was opened in Nairobi to encourage scientific investigation and bring in revenue. Meanwhile, the people at Turkana were still living on the edge of backwardness, Leakey says. The institute aims to return to the locals some of the revenue their heritage reaps. “If you can finance a first-class centre there, then these specimens should go back where they belong,” he says. Moving them back to Turkana is likely to be controversial: “It’s a storm in a pot,” he says. He appears to relish the fight to come.

Interactive graphic: Timeline of human evolution