Tanzania considers issuing a posthumous award to the British Archaeologist, Dr Louis Leakey and his wife Mary, for their contributions to the country’s historical and scientific research.
The Special Award to Dr Louis and Mary Leakey, from the Tanzanian Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, will be presented to the deceased scientists posthumously, in the forthcoming special ceremony planned during the week of Christmas 2024.
Dr Leakey, who died in October 1972, had traced human origins to Northern Tanzania through a series of discoveries in sites like the Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli.
Dr Leakey’s mission in Tanzania started in the early 1930s when Cambridge sent him to East Africa to study prehistoric African humans.
But previously he was part of an entourage dispatched to the Tendaguru Formation in the Lindi Region to try and locate dinosaurs’ remains in what is being described to be a Jurassic precinct of South-East Tanzania.
The British paleoanthropologist and archaeologist works are described to be important in demonstrating that humans evolved in Africa, but especially Tanzania, though the country has been slow to promote this important global acclaim and position.
Together with his wife paleoanthropologist, Dr Mary Leakey, the researcher established a programme of paleoanthropological inquiry in the eastern African region.
Dr Louis and Mary Leakey are said to be accountable for most of the excavations and discoveries of the hominin fossils that have been recorded at the Olduvai Gorge site in Ngorongoro.
Their dedicated works would later motivate many future generations of historical and archaeological researchers to continue their scholarly work to date.
But apart from palaeoanthropology and Archaeology the Leakeys also fostered field research of primates in their natural habitats, from which a new understanding of human evolution was forged.
Four years after Louis Leakey’s death, his wife Mary discovered the pre-historic Hominina footprints, imprinted onto caked volcanic ash at the Laetoli site, also in Northern Tanzania.
The footprints dating back nearly 4 million years were discovered in 1976 by archaeologist Mary Leakey and her team and were excavated two years later in 1978.
Dr Mary Leakey died in December 1996.