Richard Leakey catches a break and seizes it with both hands.

Withing three weeks in Ethiopia Kamoya Kimeu of the Kenyan team and long time assistant of the Leakeys discovered the first hominid fragments.

It was homo sapiens but far older sapiens material than had ever been found up till then. At possibly 130 000 years old it was more than double the age of the prevailing consensus of the times.

Within 2 weeks of that find the French found a 2 million year old Australopithecene and the Americans were soon to follow.

By Rob Bogaerts / Anefo - Nationaal Archief, CC BY 4.0, Link

Richard Leakey, being in charge of logistics, was becoming frustrated with his status as a glorified "tea boy" subservient to his father and running his errands and being at the "bottom of the pile" in qualifications and duties.

His frustrations would soon find an outlet thanks to a freak chance. His airplane was diverted by a storm and he was able to see an area that looked promising from his window that on maps appeared to hold no promise.

A short while later he borrowed the Americans helicopter to scout out the sandstone layers he had seen from the air around Lake Turkana. At their first stop they found fossils and stone tools within minutes and everywhere else they stopped produced more fossils.

The first round of the Ethiopian Omo expedition was drawing to a close, the funds were up and the Kenyan team had not much more than a homo sapiens find to show for it.

The frustrated Richard Leakey hatched a plan for his own new expedition led exclusively by himself. Whereas he had previously strongly demonstrated an unwillingness to be sucked into the career of his parents, by dropping out of school and starting his own safari business, now he saw a grand opportunity to launch a career in anthropology that would be without his father.

He retained sufficient information about the new and promising area only later revealing his true intent by hijacking the end of the National Geographic funding meeting and requesting that the bulk of the funds requested but his father Louis for further work at Omo instead go to funding his own expedition to lake Turkana.