Science and Suffering : Obsession--with fossils and recognition--ruled the Leakeys : ANCESTRAL PASSIONS: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Human Beginnings, <i> By Virginia Morell (Simon and Schuster: $30; 638 pp.)</i>

When 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.

She has examined the written records (almost every Leakey has composed at least one memoir) and interviewed a score of witnesses to prepare this sympathetic but frank group portrait. Morell begins with the arrival of the young missionary Leakeys in 1902 in British East Africa (now Kenya), where Louis was born a year later. He grew up a white African (the title of his memoir) speaking the language of the neighboring Kikuyu, among whom he had tribal brothers and for whom he headed the Corydon Museum in Nairobi, opening its doors for the first time to all Africans and Indians. Early in his career, 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.

Always enthusiastic and impatient, Leakey suffered from a what Morell calls a “hyperactive imagination and [a tendency] to hypothesize in public.” These traits won him the enmity of academic colleagues who controlled grants, but they eventually helped him garner financial support from the National Geographic Society.

In a vivid evocation of colonial East Africa, Morell recalls the society of privilege supported by coffee grown on land expropriated from Africans. Leakey was part of this world and, perhaps inevitably, race affected his attitudes: He believed that ancestral humans in their African cradle were non-Negroid. He also was a British spy among his African “brothers” during World War II and was a translator for the prosecution in the 1952 trial of rebellious Jomo Kenyatta.

British society in colonial East Africa had a frontier mentality in which passion took precedence over decorum. Louis Leakey apparently adopted this morality rather than that of his missionary parents. 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 (on the supposition that early hominids behaved like living apes). And she catalogues some of the women on whom he had, if only temporarily, a mesmerizing influence.

Mary Leakey is also featured in this epic tale, a woman who spent her girlhood with a beloved father in the Dordogne region of France, where she was in almost daily contact with Cro-Magnon archeology and cave paintings. Since Louis’ death in 1974, she has been recognized as a leading archeologist and been elected to Britain’s Royal Society, an honor that eluded Louis.

They raised their sons to be independent. Mary didn’t approve of playing games with children. Instead they learned to pull their own weight and, by age 14, each boy could fix a car, track and shoot game and manage the logistics of a camp by himself. Richard, the middle son, challenged his father’s scientific preeminence; eventually he became as controversial a paleontologist as Louis. But Richard, a second-generation African, has his own relationship with a very different Kenya.

Throughout the ‘70s, Richard privately battled kidney disease while he worked furiously in the field and in the political area of conservation. The battle ended when he accepted a transplant from his estranged younger brother.

Healthy again, he returned to the field in 1980 only to lose both legs soon afterward in an airplane crash. During his disease-wracked years, he had made significant discoveries, but their scientific value was tainted by ugly professional rivalries with the American scientists who discovered “Lucy,” for a long time the oldest fossil hominid on record.

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.

Virginia Morell has woven a complicated multibiography into a monumental history of the emergence of paleontology from the fringes of science into its trendiest, most televised, media-hyped center. Although others have conspicuously sought, and won, attention in this area, they have always worked in the shadow of Louis Leakey and family.