Fossil Family Book Unearths Some Less-Than-Flattering Details About The Leakey Family

“Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Human Beginnings,” by Virginia Morell (Simon and Schuster, $30, 638 pp.)

Then Tolstoy advised his readers (in “Anna Karenina”) that unhappy families are unhappy in different ways, he could have been talking about the Leakeys. The very model of familial dysfunction, the Leakeys are as interesting an exemplar of the heights and depths of the human condition as exists anywhere in fact or fiction.

Science journalist Virginia Morell has managed to capture the personal drama without losing any of the magic of the Leakeys’ contributions to paleontology. At sites all over Kenya - but especially at the Olduvai Gorge, where you can stand on the bedrock and look up at “layer after layer, and millennia after millennia of East Africa’s past” - the Leakeys found fossil evidence of human origins.

In “Ancestral Passions,” Morell recounts how the family obsession with fossils was expressed first by the patriarch, Louis Leakey, then passed on to wives and sons who, in jousting to outdo each other, built much of the modern science of paleoanthropology.

Early in his career, Louis Leakey argued that humans had evolved in Africa. Sixty years ago, this suggestion was anathema; scientists believed that humans had evolved in Europe or Asia.

In 1943 Leakey introduced fossil evidence of a creature he called “Proconsul” to support his claim of African origins. But he failed to preserve the site and was denounced for both sloppiness and ignorance of geological dating procedures.

British society in colonial East Africa had a frontier mentality in which passion took precedence over decorum. Louis Leakey apparently adopted this morality. Morell does not equivocate about the way Louis abandoned his first wife and infant children for the enchanting Mary Nicol.

This second marriage brought a certain poetic justice. Scientifically, it was a perfect union. Louis and Mary divided their interests; she took “stones” and he “bones.” She became a famous archeologist and he remained the great paleoanthropologist.

While still a functioning team they produced three sons - Jonathan, Richard and Philip - who grew up to “genuinely despise one another.” The attitude of disdain and rancor among the sons came to mirror the relationship between the parents. Louis continued to dally with other women and Mary grew outspokenly dismissive of Louis’s scientific style and theories, and of the way he spread his limited energy and funds on myriad projects.

A thorough reporter, Morell runs down every rumor. She reveals Leakey’s emotional and physical involvements with his “ape girls,” Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, the major beneficiaries of his efforts to fund research into primate behavior.

Beneath this absorbing drama, quite literally, Morell has provided a parallel text, largely in footnotes, where sharp-eyed readers will find a lucid history of paleontology from Cuvier in the 19th century - who worked out mathematical explanations of fossils - to modern radiocarbon dating and DNA models of evolution.

The digs continue, as do Richard Leakey’s conservation efforts. On Aug. 13, reports from Nairobi said that Richard Leakey, a candidate for public office, had been savagely beaten. Four days later, Richard’s wife, Maeve Leakey, who now leads the dig, announced the discovery of fossils 4 million years old, the oldest evidence to date of hominid bipedalism (walking upright on two legs). She found them on the shores of the same lake that her family has been exploring for 60 years.