Born: Feb 6, 1913, London, Engand
Died: Dec 9, 1996, Nairobi, Kenya
Mary Douglas Nicol Leakey was a British paleoanthropologist. The daughter of a landscape painter, Leakey was born in England but travelled abroad during much of her childhood. She became committed to anthropology at the age of 11 when she visited the rockshelter of Cro-Magnon in southern France, the site of some of the most famous early modern human fossils. She later took courses in anthropology and geology at University College, London, and became an expert in stone tools. She participated in excavations in England and in 1931 led a study in Essex of the Clactonian culture, a stone tool tradition dating to around 400,000 years ago. She then joined the British-Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey’s expeditions in Africa and married him in 1936. At the Olduvai Gorge in 1959, Mary Leakey found the 1,750,000-year-old skull of Zinjanthropus (later reclassified Australopithecus boisei), which first showed the great antiquity of hominids in Africa. At Laetoli, Tanzania, she discovered the 3,750,000-year-old jaws and teeth of a Homo species (1975) and the 3,600,000-year-old fossilized footprints of a bipedal hominid (1978). Her autobiography is Disclosing the Past (1984).
