(1913–96). English-born archaeologist and anthropologist Mary Douglas Leakey made several fossil finds of great importance that contributed to the understanding of human evolution. Her early discoveries were interpreted and publicized by her husband, noted anthropologist Louis Leakey.
Leakey was born Mary Douglas Nicol on February 6, 1913, in London, England. As a girl, she showed a talent for drawing and was interested in archaeology. After undergoing sporadic schooling, she participated in excavations of a Neolithic Period site at Hembury, Devon, England. By that time, she had become skilled at making reproduction-quality drawings of stone tools. She met Louis in 1933, and they were married in 1936. Shortly thereafter they left for an expedition to East Africa, an area that became the central location of their work.
Working alongside Louis for the next 30 years, Mary oversaw the excavation of various prehistoric sites in Kenya. Her skill at excavation surpassed her husband’s, whose brilliance lay in interpreting and publicizing the fossils that they uncovered. In 1948, on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, Mary discovered the skull of Proconsul africanus, an ancestor of both apes and early humans that lived about 25 million years ago. In 1959 at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania she discovered the skull of an early hominin (member of the human lineage). At the time Louis named it Zinjanthropus, or “eastern man,” but it is now regarded as Paranthropus, or “southern ape.”
After Louis died in 1972, Mary continued her work in Africa. In 1978 she discovered several sets of footprints made in volcanic ash by early hominins that lived about 3.5 million years ago at Laetoli, Tanzania, a site south of Olduvai Gorge. The footprints indicated that the hominins walked upright. This discovery proved that humans began walking on two legs earlier than the scientific community had previously suspected.
Among Leakey’s books are Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man (1979) and the autobiographical Disclosing the Past (1984). She died on December 9, 1996, in Nairobi, Kenya.