Mary Leakey

British archaeologist and anthropologist

• Born: February 6, 1913; London, England
• Died: December 9, 1996; Nairobi, Kenya

Mary Leakey’s disciplined approach to fossil records supplied empirical support for the theory that Africa was the cradle of humankind. Her discoveries in East Africa included the approximately 1.75-million-year-old fossils of Homo habilis at Olduvai Gorge and the approximately 3.6-million-year-old footprints of three fully upright, bipedal hominids in Laetoli.

Also known as: Mary Nicol

Primary field: Biology

Specialty: Anthropology

Early Life

Mary Douglas Leakey was born Mary Nicol, the only child of British painter Erskine Edward Nicol and Cecilia Frere Nicol. Leakey was attracted to two familial interests, drawing and fossils. Very much her father’s child, she began to draw when she was ten years old. In her autobiography, she jokes that perhaps her second area of interest, fossils, was also genetic: Her eighteenth-century ancestor, John Frere, had argued that flints found with bones of extinct animals were the work of a prehistoric people.

The Nicolses’ life was unpredictable. They moved to wherever Erskine could paint and find a place to live. As a result, Leakey’s schooling was erratic. However, she was both bright and linguistically talented. Heartbroken by her father’s sudden death in 1926, she responded to her mother’s attempt to introduce more formal instruction with defiant refusal. By 1930, however, Leakey had begun to attend lectures in both geology and archaeology, and she wanted to take part in excavations. She sent pleading letters offering her services for free, receiving a reply from Dorothy Liddell. Leakey and Liddell worked together for several seasons. Leakey’s drawing talent became clear quickly, and her drawings of the flint tools found by Liddell’s team were published. These drawings led to her introduction to anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey.

One of the archaeologists who had used Leakey’s drawings was Gertrude Caton-Thompson, who knew Louis Leakey was looking for an illustrator for his book, and she introduced them. Mary was twenty years old and talented, but naive. Louis was a thirty-year-old charismatic and dynamic visionary. He also was married with one child and another on the way. Louis would leave his wife for Mary, later marrying her, and it was not long before they were working together in Africa.

Life’s Work

The Leakeys endured several difficult years of poverty, social isolation, and professional rejection of Louis’s claims for the dates of fossils found at Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania. By mid-1937, Leakey had begun work on her own dig north of Nairobi. It was here that her best qualities began to emerge: careful and disciplined work, modern excavation techniques, cautious dating of fossils, and an ability to recognize ancient tools.

Leakey was patient, utterly devoted to her task, and able to endure privations that few would tolerate. Her skill as an artist was a tremendous asset, because photography was rare in archaeology. In 1940, after her first child was born, she did not lessen her dedication to her work, nor did she after the birth of three more children. From 1942 to 1947, she worked with her husband at Olorgesailie, a site where the abundance of tools from 1.5 million years BCE led them to hope for the hominid fossils that remained elusive. They decided to work on Rusinga Island, in the eastern part of Lake Victoria.

On Rusinga, Leakey found the pieces of a skull of Proconsul africanus, revealed by a single tooth sticking out of the ground. Lovingly reassembled by Leakey, Proconsul set the Leakeys’ future on more solid ground. Her presentation of the skull to the British Museum put her name before the public. However, results, not attention, were what she craved. Unlike her husband, who was driven by his passion to prove humans evolved in Africa, Mary Leakey only wished to discover what was there. In the 1950s, the Leakeys moved to Olduvai Gorge, but even though there was ample evidence of human activity, they found no human fossils there. The gorge was remote, and the Leakeys lived once again on the edge of poverty. Louis began to suffer a series of health problems. A trip to Laetoli in 1959 proved unfruitful, so they returned to Olduvai. In July, while her ailing husband remained in his tent, Leakey went fossil hunting and found a hominid fossil the Leakeys would call Zinjanthropus. Dating from approximately 1.75 million years BCE, the fossil was later reclassified as Paranthropus boisei.

Zinjanthropus was dropped from Louis’s “true man” list in 1960, after the Leakeys discovered the remains of Homo habilis, or “handy man.” The discovery led to an enormous uproar. Zinjanthropus, an australopithecine, and Homo habilis were, roughly speaking, contemporary, which challenged many scientists’ assumptions that two species of early hominids could not have coexisted.

The relationship between Leakey and her husband became increasingly difficult, and they eventually split. The split was worsened when Mary Leakey decided to accept an honorary degree from South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand, while Louis, a citizen of Kenya, angrily refused the degree offered to him, because of South Africa’s policy of apartheid. The Leakeys remained married, but their partnership was over.

Beginning in September 1968, Mary Leakey was living once again in Olduvai. She had already finished excavating beds I and II at the gorge. Ahead of her lay the deposits of beds III and IV. She was also close to finishing the third volume of her study Olduvai Gorge (1971). Reviewing the many fossils she had found, she saw that Homo habilis had been well named. This ancient creature had created twenty different tools, believed to have required many years of development. A most significant find was the tools made from bone, a first for Leakey.

Leakey measured, weighed, and observed every minute curve and flake of all her finds. The simple tools she found were early versions of the hand ax, but she also found some elegant, pear-shaped hand axes. She theorized from this find that an advanced people, living side by side with the Homo habilis groups, had brought the hand axes to the region, a theory that countered the prevailing view of the evolution of hominids, which was assumed to have worked in straight lines of descent.

In 1972, Louis Leakey died in London. After the funeral, Mary Leakey returned to Olduvai. Within three years, she was in Laetoli, the site of remarkable archaeological discoveries. In Laetoli, Leakey and her team found hominid teeth, the nearly complete cranium of an archaic Homo sapiens skull, and, in July 1976, fossilized animal footprints visible on layers of volcanic ash hardened over three million years. The most dramatic discovery, however, was a set of hominid footprints, found in 1978. One adult hominid had been six feet tall; a second adult appeared to have been holding the waist of the first; and a third, quite small, had been found at the side of one of the adults. The plodding footsteps seemed to indicate that two adults and a child had fled falling volcanic ash. Leakey revealed that the footprints showed that before early humans developed large brains they had stood upright, a major discovery in the evolution of the human species.

Leakey retired in the fall of 1983 and moved back to Kenya, where her sons Phillip and Richard were living. She garnered more honors, led an active life, and wrote her autobiography. She died on December 9, 1996, in Nairobi, Kenya.

Impact

Into the early twenty-first century, the empirical evidence assembled by Leakey of the long evolutionary development of Homo sapiens carried an importance that Leakey herself likely could not have imagined. Her care in amassing evidence of human evolution remains an essential component of any fair-minded assessment of the principles on which modern theories of humans in the natural world are based.

Bibliography

Bowman-Kruhm, Mary. The Leakeys: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. Print. Intended for general and high school-level readers and written in a style that moves between the serious and the breezy. Outline structure makes the complexities of the Leakeys’ interactions with one another and of the fossil finds easy to follow. Bibliography.

Feder, Kenneth L., and Michael Alan Park. Human Antiquity: An Introduction to Physical Anthropology and Archaeology. 5th ed. New York: McGraw, 2007. Print. Excellent updated account of human origins and early hominid forms, written in a readable style. Photographs, illustrations, bibliography.

Leakey, Mary. Disclosing the Past: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1984. Print. Autobiography that examines some of the painful difficulties Leakey experienced with her marriage and with her scientific competitors. Index, bibliography.

Morell, Virginia. Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings. New York: Simon, 1995. Print. Detailed work that treats all members of the complicated Leakey family; shows how the family came to dominate the field of anthropology, and discusses the animosities within the family as well as among scientists. Bibliography, index.