Spotlights
Archaeologist of the Month: Mary Leakey
Mary Douglas Leakey was a renowned British archaeologist and paleoanthropologist whose findings advanced our understanding of human origins and evolution. She is best known for her discovery of the 1.75-million-year-old fossil of Homo habilis at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and her discovery of the 3.6-million-year-old footprints found at Laetoli, Tanzania. Through her meticulous fieldwork and research, she unearthed these and other fossil remains that provided critical insights into the origins and development of early humans.
Born as Mary Douglas Nicol on February 6, 1913, in London, England, she spent much of her childhood living in France. Her father, Erskine Nicol, exposed her to prehistoric sites, such as the caves at Pech Merle in Dordogne, France which showcase prehistoric cave paintings (Holloway 1994). This interaction, as well as others, led Leakey to plan to pursue a career in archaeology and geology (The Leakey Family n.d.). In her youth she became a talented illustrator, aided by her father, himself a painter. She began to work on archaeological sites in the U.K. when she was seventeen (Holloway 1994), which combined her interest in archaeology and her talent as an illustrator to bring artifacts and sites to life through drawings.
Archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson took Leakey under her wing and helped her to expand her professional network. It was because of this that she met and began working with Louis Leakey in 1933. They married at the end of 1936 and became a well-known husband-and-wife duo (Holloway 1994; Mary Leakey 2021; Clark 2001).
Mary and Louis embarked on numerous expeditions in East Africa from 1935 to 1959, making multiple important discoveries during that time (Holloway 1994). In 1948, Mary made the first substantial discovery of her career, the approximately 16-million-year-old skull of the Proconsul africanus hominoid. This was a primate that was thought to bring us one step closer to finding the “missing link” in the human evolutionary chain.
In 1959, at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Mary found the roughly 1.8-million-year-old hominid skull Zinjanthropus. Referred to as “Zinj,” this was the first of a new group of hominids and the first skull of this kind found in East Africa (Holloway 1994; Mary Leakey 2021). Its discovery in Africa showed the long history of hominids in Africa and changed the way the world at that time thought about where human evolution may have occurred (The Leakey Family n.d.). In 1961, Mary found the remains of the hominid Homo habilis, the “tool user.” This hominid’s discovery was vastly important because of the evidence of tool use, something considered to be distinctly human (The Leakey Family n.d.; Mary Leakey 2021).
After her husband’s death in 1972, Mary Leakey went on to make another discovery of great importance: the Laetoli hominid footprints found at the archaeological site Laetoli, a place near Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, in 1976 and 1977 (Mary Leakey 2021). These footprints, dating back approximately 3.6 million years, provided the earliest evidence of human-like bipedalism in early human ancestors (Holloway 1994).
In addition to her outstanding work in the field, she published multiple works and gave lectures on her and her husband’s work at Olduvai Gorge after his passing. Her two most notable works were Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man, which she published in 1979, and her autobiography, Disclosing the Past, published in 1984 (Mary Leakey 2021).
Mary Leakey was a preeminent archaeologist and paleoanthropologist who made many valuable discoveries. Her skillful excavation and tireless work in East Africa led to the uncovering of various hominoid fossils that changed the way we think about human evolution to this day. Her legacy lives on in the fields of archaeology and paleoanthropology as a testament to her hard work and passion for perfection.
References
Bowman-Kruhm, M. (2005). The Leakeys: a biography. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Clark, J. (2001). Mary Douglas Leakey, 1913-1996. In Proceedings of the British Academy (Vol. 111, pp. 595-614).
Holloway, M. (1994, October). Mary Leakey: Unearthing History. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mary-leakey-unearthing-hi/
Mary Leakey. Biography. (2021, March 30). https://www.biography.com/scientists/mary-leakey
Morell, V. (2011). Ancestral passions: The Leakey family and the quest for humankind's beginnings. Simon and Schuster.
The Leakey family. The Leakey Foundation. (n.d.). https://leakeyfoundation.org/about/the-leakey-family/
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