Bernard Wood

A very consequential paleoanthropologist

Although Richard Leakey liked to stress his lack of formal education and training in paleoanthropology, this talk will emphasize that his contributions to human origins research were not just evidential. His intellectual curiosity was infectious, and by deliberately gathering like-minded colleagues around him, he is indirectly responsible for an impressive range of research initiatives, many of which continue to this day.

FULL TRANSCRIPT 

Good afternoon everybody. It's my task to explain to you why Richard is an extremely consequential paleoanthropologist, and I want to try and explain his direct and indirect contributions to Paleoanthropology. This is a challenge for me because I will do my best to make this as objective as possible, but he and I were friends for more than half a century, so I can't claim to be successful. One of Richard's names was Frere, and this was given to him because his mother, Mary Leakey was the great granddaughter of John Frere, who is the guy on the left who recovered flint hand axes and the fossilized remains of extinct animals from near his home at a place called Hoxne in Suffolk, he's credited with being the father of prehistoric archeology like Richard. He was a politician; he was a member of parliament, and he was also an FRS. 

And I have an intense dislike for the phrase it is in their DNA, especially when it's applied to organizations, which as far as I do know, as far as I know, do not have any. But in Richard's case, archeology and paleontology really were metaphorically in his DNA. He was born before Louis and Mary Leakey became household names, and the school holidays were spent either in Western Kenya or at Olduvai. He was effectively homeschooled by his parents in paleoanthropology. He didn't like his high school and he asked his parents if he could leave and they said yes as long as he supported himself. And so in addition to continuing to trap animals for Des Bartlett, he recovered animals that had died in a drought in Kenya and he sold their skeletons to universities and schools, and he made enough money doing this as well as starting a small safari business, which was based initially on escorting the officials of the National Geographic Society when they came to visit his parents in Kenya. All these activities honed skills that were to prove extremely important in the years to come. And in 1962, Richard had earned enough money from this to buy an airplane, and when he was flying from Nairobi to Olduvai, he flew over some sediments that were exposed in the region of Lake Natron, which was, and the sediments looked like the ones that his parents were working on at Olduvai. 

So encouraged by his parents and using part of the National Geographic Society funding from his parents, I gather without probably permission, he organized a reconnaissance expedition to Lake Natron, and the person on the right is Glenn Isaac, who was the young archeologist who went with him initially to Natron. They recovered some promising looking fossils in the region of Natron near the Peninj river. And Richard returned to Nairobi with Glen and then he returned to Natron, not only with Glen, but with his younger brother and with Kamoya Kimeu who was working for his parents, who was working at the time with his parents at Olduvai, along with a photographer whose name that you might recognize called Hugo Van Lawick. And the task of Hugo Van Lawick was to make a record of this expedition, and the expedition was extremely successful in that Kamoya recovered a mandible from the sediments and the mandible is on the left for the archeologists in the audience, and the mandible was clearly a good match for the cranium that his parents had found and had attributed to Zinjathropus boisei. 

This discovery is still one of the best-preserved mandibles of Paranthropus boisei, as we now call it. And because of Hugo Van Lawick's images and the discovery, they were able to raise funds from the National Geographic to go back to Natron. They didn't find any more hominins, but they did find some stone artifacts, which are now known to be 1.4 million years old or thereabouts. In 1965, after accompanying his father to the National Geographic Society in Washington, Richard attended a crammer in the UK and was destined to go to university, but his safari business needed some attention, and so he came back to Kenya and never went to university, which Richard described to me as the best decision he's ever made in his life. Apart from marrying Meave. Richard then worked in the Baringo region where some discoveries, some hominins have been discovered, a mandible and an ulna, and Richard persuaded his father that he should go and supervise the expedition in the Baringo region. No more hominins were recovered, but they recovered the skeleton nearly the whole skeleton of an elephant and the excavation of this skeleton, its preservation, and its transfer to Nairobi, were also experiences that were very important for Richard later on. 

The work in the Kapthurin Formation also resulted in Richard's first solo publication. Louis Leakey had always been interested in trying to expand the search for human origins to the region of Ethiopia near the Omo River, where it drained into what then was called Lake Rudolf Louis had managed to persuade the emperor highly Haile Selassie to allow an expedition, an international expedition into Southern Ethiopia. And there was a component from the USA, so they were going to go to the area which is on the slide. You can see at the top of the slide, they were going to go with an expedition that had a component from the United States led by Clark Howell and one from France that was due to be led by Camille Aramboug, but he was unwell, and it was led by Yves Coppens. And next week, some of us are going to a memorial meeting in Paris to commemorate the life of the latter. So Richard was the very junior partner leading the African component of the expedition. And he maybe because of this, the area that was allocated to the Kenyans was either much younger than the sediments that were very productive at Olduvai or much older. 

They're also extremely difficult to get to. Richard was a little frustrated by this, and despite the fact that the expedition recovered the oldest evidence for Homo sapiens, it wasn't known to be that old at the time, but that's the case. Richard wasn't happy and he asked to borrow the helicopter, which the well-funded Americans had at their disposal, and he was able to fly to look at the sediments at the northern end of what was then called Lake Rudolf, that he had been flying over on his way from Nairobi. So what he decided to do the following year was to say yes, but no thank you to rejoining the International Omo Expedition and to go to north to northern Kenya himself. And so there on the slide, you can see the the Omo River entering into the north of what was then called Lake Rudolf. And the region that Richard had stopped in the helicopter is on the east side of the lake, the expedition, which was funded by the National Geographic Society in 1968, and of which I was by far the most junior member because I was a medical student, recovered the modest haul of hominins, not much, but enough to persuade the National Geographic Society to give him more money. 

The 1969 expedition, which included then Meave Epps and Kay BehrensMeyer, who is in the audience recovered a well-preserved what by then by some was called Australopithecus or Paranthropus boisei Cranium. And they also discovered some stone artifacts which might, and at the time were thought to be much older than those from Olduvai Gorge because at the time the ash layer in which the artifacts were embedded was thought to be 2.6 million years old. The following year, Richard invited Glenn Isaac, who had gone with him to Natron to be the co-leader of what became known as the East Rudolf Research Expedition, and at the heart of that expedition, and so this is Lake Rudolf, and the image on the top left has a gentleman walking towards us who's also in the audience, and you can see the exposures. This is what the fossil site looks like. It's not like Olduvai, which is sort of manageable. There is a main gorge and a side gorge at Olduvai, and Olduvai looks like everybody's idea of a fossil site. It's a gorge, and you can see the layers nicely arranged in the side of the gorge. That wasn't the case at East Rudolf, and that had implications for the history of the research. 

But the Kenyans, most of the fossils were found by the field crew, which was employed by the National Museums of Kenya. And you can see on the left, Kamoya Kimeu and other members of the team, the next year, more fossils were found and those fossils including the cranium on the right on left is 406, which was the one that was found in 1969. And Richard way back suggested that the cranium on the right was not a new species but may well be the representative of smaller bodied members of the same species as 406. And this was a very remarkably acute observation. The hominin fossils were coming thick and fast, and so Richard decided that he needed to plan for how they were published. So his idea was that he would announce them in letters that he submitted to Nature, and we in the expedition, or at least some of us in the expedition, rather notedly referred to these as what I did in my summer holidays, letters. And he sent these to Nature. At his leaving party, John Maddox, who was the editor at the time, explained to me that he never sent Richard's manuscripts out for review. What was the point? Because they were describing fossils that nobody else had seen, and that when he sent articles from the Leakey out to review, most people sort of dumped on them, really out of principle. And so John Maddox decided not to send them out to review 

Most of these I hand delivered to the old Nature offices in Little Essex Street. The Nature offices were the floor below the offices of the Nursing Times, I remember, which was also published by Macmillan at that time. So the next phase was to describe the hominin fossils without comparing them to other fossils. But just to describe what was there, this was criticized, but I still think it was an extremely sensible decision. Richard's preference was that Kenyans should be involved in these descriptions. And so he recruited Joe Mungai, who was the professor of anatomy at the University of Nairobi. Joe Mungai suggested that he also involved Alan Walker, who was in the anatomy department at the University of Nairobi. And when the material was coming so thick fast that the two of them couldn't cope, he recruited Michael Day, who was my PhD supervisor, and eventually they scraped the barrel and they invited me. The idea for the third phase was that we would write monographs, which would compare the fossils coming from what by then was called Koobi Fora, with the fossils to the early hominins from elsewhere in Africa. None of the Walker, Day, Wood team had any particular expertise in cranial morphology. None of us were dentists and none of us had specialized in dental morphology. 

So none of us were really keen to take on the task of making sense of the vast majority of the fossils, which were the cranial and the mandibular and the dental fossils. Richard very characteristically would not let seniority decide who did what. So, we were all at a Wenner Gren Conference in New York, and we were staying at the Westbury Hotel, and Richard invited us into his room to try and see if we could come to a decision, we couldn't. So Richard went into the bathroom and he broke three matches and he put them between his fingers and he came out of the bathroom and he said, you have to pull a match, and the person who gets the longest match can choose what they work on. The person who can get with the second longest match can choose. So the choice was either the head or the limbs or a sort of a general look at all the fossil record and the second person, and then the third person has no choice. It is a matter of history that I drew the shortest match. And Richard said to me, Woody, you are doing the head. 

I should say to you that he used to call me Woody, and I used to call him Leaks or if he was being very bad, tricky Dicky. And so, the match drawing took place in 1974, and the Koobi Fora monograph on the cranial remains was published in 1991. A very glacial rate  of progress, but in my defense, nobody knew what the hell any of these things meant, and it took a long time to travel across the world and to look at all the relevant fossils and so on and so forth. Richard wasn't enamored with my interpretation, I think it's fair to say, but he let me have my way grudgingly at times, but he let me have my way. There is someone in this room who described a little book that was my first attempt to summarize human evolution as being concise to the point of abruptness. That is a good summary of Richard's preface for the cranial monograph. He said as much as he needed to say, but he certainly wasn't effusive. We laughed about it later. Then in the next field season in 1971, they recovered this little juvenile Homo jaw, and we were very excited, and there's Richard looking at it, and we were extremely excited because there were clearly bones that were beneath. So we thought, boy, there's the rest of the skeleton. There was indeed a skeleton, but it happened to be of a giraffe, and these bones just must have been washed together, and it was very tantalizing. But the reality was the reality. That year, they also found, and that's a little child's jaw, and you can see on the incisors.

These little marks, which are interruptions in the manufacturer of enamel, which mark some sort of event in that child's life, maybe an infection. So there is absolutely the wonderful information that can be got from these fossils is just extraordinary. There was also a Homo mandible, which we weren't allowed to assign things to species, but just because we did what Richard was told, it doesn't mean everybody did what Richard was told. And so, Groves and Mazak, they used this mandible as the type specimen of a species called Homo ergaster. Then the following year, the expedition discovered this cranium, which is here on the front cover of Nature, along with some limb bones and some other specimens, which clearly did not belong to Paranthropus boisei. You really don't have to be a rocket scientist to recognize Paranthropus boisei. It is very distinctive. This material was not Paranthropus boisei and might be the Homo species that his parents have been discovering at Olduvai. News of the discovery of 1470 had leaked out, and Richard was a late invitee to a symposium at the Zoological Society of London, which was organized by  Solly Zuckerman, Lord Zuckerman, to honor his mentor who was Sir Grafton Elliot Smith. 

The press got wind of this, but Zuckerman wouldn't let the press into the meeting room of the Zoological Society of London. In fact, he was pretty pissed off by the whole business because Richard's discovery had really removed the emphasis of the meeting, which was to honor Sir Grafton Elliot Smith. So, we hastily arranged a press conference at the Kenyan embassy, and the pictures of Richard with 1470, which were in the press at that time, were taken in the garden of the Kenyan embassy in Portland Place. The field seasons after that from 1973 to 1976 were extremely productive. This was a cranium which was discovered at that time, and now you can see the cranium. Okay, it looks very obvious. Where is it? Okay, it's a very hot day. You woke up at five 30 in the morning. You had some tea for breakfast. You might've had something else for breakfast. You got in a Land rover. You sat in the back of the Land Rover for two hours with your backside being bumped up and done. If you was junior, as I was in the back of the Land Rover, you then had walked for three or four hours, 

Your attention had wandered. And so how do you find this? Well, the answer is that I didn't, but the Kenyans did, and there are the fragments of the tooth crowns. And then Richard and I flew up, and then I watched Richard excavate it. And you can see it's looking a little more promising now. It's looking even more promising, and now it's looking even more promising because you can see around the back to see that there is a cranium, and then that's the cranium that you saw in the initial picture. So that's how the fossils are found. This was another discovery that was made in the same year, and you can see Richard excavating the cranium of what is an early African Homo erectus. This was found at more or less the same level. So there it is. This was found at more or less the same level as the cranium that had been found by Richard and Meave in 1969. And at the time, there was a hypothesis that only one early hominin lived at any one time. It was called the single species hypothesis. And you don't have to be an expert to realize that these two crania don't belong to the same species. 

If you look at them from the top, they're very different. And this cranium, the discovery of this cranium was effectively the end of the single species hypothesis. The research then moved onto the west side of the lake, and there was the discovery of the Turkana Boy, and you can see here Richard and Alan Walker at the beginning of the excavation, and there is the resulting skeleton. A lot of work was involved between the beginning of that excavation and the recovery of all those fossils. And then also they discovered a likely precursor, to Paranthropus boisei and this was the Black Skull. And then later Meave discovered, discovered evidence of another hominin species that was living alongside Australopithecus afarensis. The exposures at Koobi For a were unlike the exposures, the exposures at Olduvai. And that led to a controversy about the age of the fossils, including the 1470 cranium. And here is a picture of Richard, and I'm showing you this picture. This is the only picture I know of him not driving. So here's Richard, and here's Ian Finlater, and there is Jack Miller and there is Frank Fitch. And the reason I'm showing you this picture is that Richard did not want to use  the scientists who had been responsible for dating the ash layers at Olduvai because those were the ones his parents used, and he wanted to be independent. So he recruited. He was advised that there were two guys in the UK, Jack Miller at Cambridge, and Frank Fitch, 

And that these two guys were hot shots at the very difficult task of working out the ages of the ash layers. The problem was that the Fitch, the Fitch Miller combination, they made a mistake and they used a new method, which they called step heating, which they thought could reveal the real age of an ash, which was very dirty, and they overplayed their hand and they made a mistake. This resulted in what was called the KBS controversy, and there were a lot of harsh words which were exchanged. There was a meeting at the Geological Society of London in the 1970s that got extremely heated. Richard eventually realized that he'd backed the wrong horse. Richard had a very strong sense of loyalty, and so he was reluctant to abandon the older age just because older white haired people said he should. And so Richard, he backed the what eventually we discovered was the wrong horse. But nonetheless, once he was convinced, he was so convinced that he invited Frank Brown, who was in charge of the dating in the Omo Shungura formation, he invited Frank Brown to come down to work on the sediments on the east and west side of the lake. So Richard was loyal 

:And he was stubborn, but when he knew that he could change, he could change. So as well as leading the teams that the contributed directly to expanding the fossil and the archeological record, Richard contributed much indirectly to to paleoanthropology by establishing the institutions and strengthening the National Museum of Kenya. His father had been the curator of what was the Coryndon Museum. And when I first went to Africa, it was pretty sleepy. It was largely visited by expats, and it was largely staffed by expats. 

Richard dragged the old Coryndon Museum kicking and screaming, I think will be an appropriate description into its new role as the flagship of the National Museums of Kenya. Richard was instrumental in raising funds for the International Louis Leaky Memorial Institute for African Prehistory. Soon after it was officially opened in 1977 the kidney transplant took Richard away from Kenya for an extended period. During his absence, the institute faced considerable substantial administrative difficulties, and despite the best efforts of David Pilbeam, who took leave from Yale to be the scientific advisor to the director, when Richard came back from the UK with his new kidney, he integrated the functions and the buildings of the TILLMIAP (The International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory) into the National Museums of Kenya. Richard believed that for the Turkana region, long viewed as lacking natural resources or conventional natural resources, the remains of its prehistoric occupants, along with the archeological, the archeological evidence of their behavior could be used to improve the health and the education and the economic prospects of that region. You will hear more about that from Dino later this afternoon. The mission of the TBI extends well beyond paleoanthropology, but I cannot overstress its importance for paleoanthropology. 

As scientists, we bear responsibility and must accept the consequences of our professional and personal behavior. That behavior determines our reputation, along with our publications, our students, and our other mentees, and they all make up the whatever professional legacy we have. as far as publications are concerned one way of measuring the impact of a person's publications is called VH Index, and I'm grateful for Gordon Augustson, who is a graduate student who actually researched Richard's H Index. And Richard's H Index is approximately 55, which means that 55 of his publications have been cited at least 55 times. There is another index, which is called the Kardashian Index, which Richard does really badly in, and there really is a Kardashian index. And Richard's, my Kardashian index is zero because it's the number of Twitter followers divided by the number of times your papers have been cited. So as neither Richard or I have any Twitter followers, we have a zero Kardashian index. But let me return to the H index, which is rather more conventional. So what does that mean? Well, there are 43 people attending this meeting, and only seven of them have a higher age index than Richard and Damnit. It wasn't for us. It's our full-time job. It wasn't Richard's full-time job. 

The H index of the attendees range from 103. You know who you are, if I can find you. Okay. And then the other seven, they go down to 63, and then Richard kicks in. So that's a remarkable achievement for somebody who wasn't a conventional academic. Richard had no students. And I also want to show you some information which was very kindly provided by colleagues at the Virginia Commonwealth University. And it's a citation analysis, and this is Richard's impact on our field shown visually, and this is a particular sort of aspect of it, Richard's work, his scientific work had a substantial impact. We should not forget that Richard had no students in the conventional sense, but he influenced legions of people, including many in this room. He inspired a huge global audience through his writing and his speaking. And I've lost count of the number of people, including many prominent academics, who tell me that their interest in human evolution was sparked by attending one of his lectures or reading one of his books, or looking at films that he featured. Or by receiving a handwritten letter of encouragement, he gave many people, including me, life-changing opportunities, and in my case, twice 

The expeditions he led or facilitated or encouraged. These were the early hominins that were known when Richard was born. These are the early hominins that are recognized today. Today. These are the early Hominins that Richard's work substantially contributed to their fossil record. And I could also put red dotted lines around lots of other tax that were either discovered by Meave or by people that Richard encouraged. Richard prided himself in not being a conventional academic. He wore it as a badge of courage indeed. But his upbringing and his early career provided him with experiences and influences no conventional university education could possibly have supplied. He was a natural leader, and occasionally and only occasionally was his primacy challenged. In the 1970s, he played host to Prince Philip, who was in Africa looking at birds on a birdwatching expedition. And Prince Philip and his birdwatching friends came for lunch. And Richard indicated to Prince Philip that he should sit next to him because as Richard said, as Richard said to Prince Philip, I always sit at the head of the table. And then Prince Philip looked at him and said, where I sit becomes the head of the table. 

The rest of us smiled, but we made sure that it didn't show. Richard enjoyed unusual opportunities and privileges, but no one could have exploited them for the common good more successfully. And with as much style and with as much humor as he did, it was my good fortune to have been Richard's friend and colleague for a long time. In 1793, William Blake wrote that opposition is true friendship. Richard and I told each other not what we each wanted to know, but what we felt the other should know. We both understood that our ability to do this and remain friends was a precious gift. As my students will tell you, I'm averse to hyperbole and I normally avoid adverbs, but Richard really was a very consequential paleoanthropologist. Richard, thank you. Asante sana!

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