Mary Leakey | Biography

Mary Leakey was born Mary Douglas Nicol on February 6, 1913, in London. Her mother was Cecilia Frere, the great-granddaughter of John Frere, who had discovered prehistoric stone tools at Hoxne, Suffolk, England, in 1797. Her father was Erskine Nicol, a painter who also had a deep interest in Egyptian archaeology. When Mary was a child, her family made frequent trips to southwestern France, where her father took her to see the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings. She and her father became friends with Elie Peyrony, the curator of the local museum, and there she was exposed to the vast collection of flint tools dating from that period of human prehistory. She was also allowed to accompany Peyrony on his excavations.

By 1930, Mary Nicol had undertaken coursework in geology and archaeology at the University of London and had participated in a few excavations in order to obtain field experience. One of her lecturers, R. E. M. Wheeler, offered her the opportunity to join his party excavating St. Albans, England, the ancient Roman site of Verulamium; although she only remained at that site for a few days, she began her career in earnest shortly thereafter, excavating Neolithic (early Stone Age) sites in Henbury, Devon, where she worked between 1930 and 1934. Her main area of expertise was stone tools. During the 1930s Mary met Louis Leakey, who was to become her husband. Leakey was by this time well known because of his finds of early human remains in East Africa.

In 1934 Mary Nicol and Louis Leakey worked at an excavation in Clacton, England, where the skull of a hominid--a family of erect primate mammals that use only two feet for locomotion--had recently been found and where Louis was investigating Paleolithic geology as well as fauna and human remains. The excavation led to Mary Leakey's first publication, a 1937 report in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.

By this time, Louis Leakey had decided that Mary should join him on his next expedition to Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), which he believed to be the most promising site for discovering early Paleolithic human remains.

At Olduvai, among her earliest discoveries were fragments of a human skull; these were some of the first such remains found at the site, and it would be twenty years before any others would be found there. Mary Nicol and Louis Leakey returned to England. Leakey's divorce from his first wife was made final in the mid-1930s, and he and Mary Nicol were then married; the couple returned to Kenya in January of 1937. Over the next few years, the Leakeys excavated Neolithic and Iron Age sites at Hyrax Hill, Njoro River Cave, and the Naivasha Railway Rock Shelter, which yielded a large number of human remains and artifacts.

During World War II, the Leakeys began to excavate at Olorgasailie, southwest of Nairobi. In 1942, Mary Leakey uncovered hundreds, possibly thousands, of hand axes there. Her first major discovery in the field of pre-human fossils was that of most of the skull of a Proconsul africanus Proconsul africanuson Rusinga Island, in Lake Victoria, Kenya, in 1948. Proconsul was believed by some paleontologists to be a common ancestor of apes and humans, an animal whose descendants developed into two branches on the evolutionary tree: the Pongidae (great apes) and the Hominidae (who eventually evolved into true humans). Proconsul lived during the Miocene, approximately 18 million years ago. This was the first time a fossil ape skull had ever been found--only a small number have been found since. Proconsul is now generally believed to be a species of Dryopithecus, closer to apes than to humans.

In 1959, Mary unearthed part of the jaw of an early hominid she designated Zinjanthropus (meaning "East African Man") and whom she referred to as "Dear Boy"; the early hominid is now considered to be a species of Australopithecus-- apparently related to the two kinds of australopithecine found in South Africa, Australopithecus africanus and Australopithecus robustus-- and given the species designation boisei in honor of Louis Leakey's sponsor Charles Boise. By means of potassium-argon dating, recently developed, it was determined that the fragment was 1.75 million years old, and this realization pushed back the date for the appearance of hominids in Africa. Despite the importance of this find, however, Louis Leakey was slightly disappointed, as he had hoped that the excavations would unearth not another australopithecine, but an example of Homo living at that early date. Leakey hoped that Mary Leakey's find would prove that Homo existed at that early level of Olduvai. The discovery he awaited did not come until the early 1960s, with the identification of a skull found by their son Jonathan Leakey.

In her autobiography, Disclosing the Past, released in 1984, Mary Leakey reveals that her professional and personal relationship with Louis Leakey had begun to deteriorate by 1968. She increasingly began to lead the Olduvai research on her own, and she developed a reputation in her own right through her numerous publications of research results. During these years at Olduvai, Mary made numerous new discoveries, including the first Homo erectus pelvis to be found. Mary Leakey continued her work after Louis Leakey's death in 1972. From 1975 she concentrated on Laetoli, Tanzania, which was a site earlier than the oldest beds at Olduvai. She knew that the lava above the Laetoli beds was dated to 2.4 million years ago, and the beds themselves were therefore even older; in contrast, the oldest beds at Olduvai were two million years old. Potassium-argon dating has since shown the upper beds at Laetoli to be approximately 3.5 million years old. In 1978, members of her team found two trails of hominid footprints in volcanic ash dated to approximately 3.5 million years ago; the form of the footprints gave evidence that these hominids walked upright, thus moving the date for the development of an upright posture back significantly earlier than previously believed. Mary Leakey considered these footprints to be among her most significant finds. She died in Nairobi, Kenya, on December 8, 1996.

In the late 1960s, Mary Leakey received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, an honor she accepted only after university officials had spoken out against apartheid. Among her other honorary degrees are a D.S.Sc. from Yale University and a D.Sc. from the University of Chicago. She received an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford University in 1981. She has also received the Gold Medal of the Society of Women Geographers.