Origins of the species

The sustained and painstaking work of the Leakey family since the 1940s has changed our understanding of human evolution

Last month, on Christmas day, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into deep space to peer into the origins of the universe. Last week, Richard Leakey, the famous Kenyan paleoanthropologist and conservationist, who spent much of his life researching the origins of the human species in the East African Great Rift Valley, died at his home near Nairobi at the age of 77. He belonged to an extraordinary family of British-Kenyan fossil seekers/analysts who may have contributed, since Charles Darwin, more to our understanding of the origins of Homo sapiens than any other single family in the world. His