Louis Leakey was a British paleoanthropologist who made many discoveries and much commotion in the mid 20th century. He burst onto the world stage out of Olduvai Gorge, in East Africa, with fossilized evidence that this indeed was the cradle of mankind, the Garden of Eden, if you will. This discovery, in 1959, rocked the bedrock of anthropology which had assumed that man's roots were in Asia. But look out world, for Louis Leakey was not about to rest on his "missing link" laurels.

"Unfortunately, behavior does not fossilize," Leakey was fond of saying. Nevertheless, he wanted to know about the behavior of the species he had unearthed. Confident to the point of being evangelical, he possessed swagger enough to propose that the only way to get a glimpse of early man's behavior would be to study his closest relatives in the wild, the great apes. How's that for stirring up the status quo? This notion was so preposterous at the time that even his closest colleagues (including wife Dr. Mary) thought he'd gone mad. But leakey was not easily dissuaded. (Next photo)