Mary Leakey, expelled from two schools, found some of humanity's oldest traces
One morning in July 1959, with her husband ill in camp, Mary Leakey spotted a skull fragment at Olduvai Gorge, brushed away the soil, found two big teeth in a curved jaw and drove back shouting that she had got him. The find, nicknamed Zinjanthropus, made the Leakeys famous.
Born in London on 6 February 1913, Mary Nicol grew up following her father, a watercolour painter, around France, Italy, Egypt and the United States. At 12, staying at Les Eyzies, she sifted through the spoil heap of a careless cave excavation, collecting blades and scrapers and inventing her first classification scheme. Formal schooling went badly after her father died: one convent expelled her for refusing to recite poetry, another after she caused an explosion in the chemistry lab, and Oxford advised her not to bother applying. She attended lectures unregistered in London instead and learned fieldwork on digs under Mortimer Wheeler and Dorothy Liddell.
Her skill as an illustrator led her to Louis Leakey, who needed drawings for a book; they married in 1936. Working in Kenya and Tanzania, often with their sons in tow and pet hyraxes raiding the dinner table, they dug at sites from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. In October 1948 she found the first fossil skull of Proconsul, an extinct ape, on Rusinga Island. At Olduvai she built a system for sorting the stone tools, the earliest of them probably made by Homo habilis more than two million years ago. Her contributions were frequently credited to Louis.
After his death in 1972 she ran the Olduvai excavations herself and trained her son Richard. At Laetoli she found hominin fossils more than 3.75 million years old, and between 1976 and 1981 her team uncovered a trail of footprints pressed into volcanic ash about 3.6 million years ago. She also recorded Tanzania's rock paintings, discovered fifteen new animal species, and taught the Kenyan fossil hunter Kamoya Kimeu, who went on to train later generations.
Oxford, which had turned her away, gave her an honorary doctorate in 1981. She died in Nairobi on 9 December 1996, aged 83.
Source: Mary Leakey
