Mary Leakey biography

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Archaeologist. Born Mary Douglas Nicol on February 6, 1913, in London, England. Mary Leakey is best known for her discoveries in Africa, which advanced our understanding of the origins of humankind. The daughter of an artist, she excelled at drawing. Leakey used this talent as her entry into the field of archaeology; she served as an illustrator at a dig in England when she was only seventeen.

In 1930s, Mary Leakey was asked to illustrate a book entitled Adam??s Ancestors (1934). The work??s author was Louis B. S. Leakey, an archaeologist and anthropologist, and the pair soon developed a personal relationship. They married in 1937, forming one of science??s most well-known husband-wife teams. The couple moved to Africa as part of Louis Leakey??s excavation of the Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania.

In 1948, Mary Leakey made her first big discovery??a partial skull fossil of Proconsul africanus, an ancestor of apes and humans, which later developed into the two distinct species. This was a remarkable find; it was the first of its kind uncovered and was believed to be more than 18 million years old. She further helped unravel the mystery of human history with her 1958 find. She discovered a jaw of an early human ancestor, which showed how long this species had been in Africa. The artifact dated back almost two million years.
Louis Leakey died in 1972, and Mary Leakey continued on with her research and fossil hunting. She began working at a new site in Tanzania called Laetoli where she found fossilized footsteps and the discovery changed assumptions about primates. She chronicled her experiences in the 1979 book Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man and in her 1984 autobiography Disclosing the Past.

Mary Leakey died on December 9, 1996, in Nairobi, Kenya. With her husband, Louis Leakey, she had three sons, Richard, Jonathan, and Philip. The Leakey Foundation now carries on the work of the Leakey family. Richard Leakey, his wife Meave, and their daughter Louise play active roles in continuing the family legacy.

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