After his famous discovery at Olduvai, Leakey left Mary behind to dig in the African dirt and set off on an entirely new tangent. With a twinkle in his eye, a flowing white mane, and boundless good cheer, the African lion could usually get what he wanted, from a single patron or a room full of skeptics. And what he wanted most was to put flesh on the bones he'd discovered. He wanted to know about the behavior of man's earliest ancestors.

Leakey's next sortie into the unknown, the curtain call to Olduvai, was to suggest long-term field studies of primates as the best, and perhaps the only way, to gain insight into early man's behavior and social life. He reasoned that we should learn all we could about our closest living relatives, the great apes, since behavior common to modern man and apes would likely have been present 1.75 million years ago when the Olduvai fossils were roaming East Africa. This project would be costly and time consuming and would test all his powers of persuasion. (next photo)