Mary Douglas Leakey, F.B.A.

Mary Leakey (née Nicol), daughter of landscape painter Erskine Nicol, was born in London on 6 February 1913, but spent much of her childhood in France, taught by a governess. Although he died when she was only thirteen, her father was a strong influence in her life; he nurtured her instinctive interest in prehistory (her great-great-great-grandfather was John Frere, the first Englishman to recognize that certain flaked flints were indeed stone tools) born out of their explorations together of the cave paintings of the Dordogne. Devastated by his early death, Mary found it difficult to accept school discipline and gained no scholastic qualifications, though she spoke French fluently and participated in excavations under the directorship of the Abbé Lemozi at Cabrerets in France. She also dug at Hembury Fort in Devon and Jaywick Sands in Essex and, having inherited her father's talent as a draughtsman, began to draw prehistoric artefacts. She illustrated Gertrude Caton Thompson's book, The Desert Fayoum, and this commission led to a meeting in Cambridge with anthropologist Louis Leakey, F.S.A., who asked her to illustrate his book, Adam's Ancestors (1934). Leakey, a thirty-year old husband and father, returned to Kenya, where he was honorary director of the Coryndon Museum, leaving his family behind, and was joined soon afterwards by Mary, then aged twenty. After painful divorce proceedings they were married in 1936. The Leakeys first excavated at Olduvai Gorge on the western margin of the Eastern Rift Valley in Tanzania in 1935. Always working on a shoestring, they continued to make sporadic visits to survey and excavate between digs elsewhere; many mammal fossils and stone tools were unearthed but the remains of early man, who had obviously been active there, eluded them for more than twenty years. Other sites also claimed Mary's attention during this period: the early Iron Age site at Hyrax Hill, near Nakuru in Kenya; the Acheulean site at Olorgesailie, near Nairobi and Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria which yielded the shattered skull of Proconsul africanus, a sixteen-million-year-old Miocene ape, at that time the only known fossil ape skull, which Mary reconstructed from countless fragments. By 1959, when she made her most spectacular find, Mary was recognized as a palaeoanthropologist in her own right, rather than Louis Leakey's assistant. In July of that year, during one of their irregular visits to Olduvai Gorge, Mary discovered a hominid molar tooth, followed by fragments of an early hominid cranium which, again, she painstakingly pieced together. Initially referred to as Zinjanthropus boisei, but now more usually placed in Paranthropus boisei, the discovery of the skull attracted generous financial support from the National Geographic Society of Washington which enabled the Leakeys to mount a sustained research programme. Geochemists from Berkeley, using the relatively new technique of potassium-argon dating of the sediments, proved the skull to be 1.7 million years old and established the first absolute chronology for any early hominid site. So, Olduvai Gorge became the yardstick by which dates of other sites could be calibrated and Mary went on to discover other hominid remains, including Homo habilis in 1960, a hominid with a larger brain and smaller chewing teeth than Paranthropus boisei, and the limb bones of Homo erectus. In the 1960s Mary's international reputation as a prehistorian burgeoned. Until 1964, publication of their finds of hominid remains was always in the name of Louis Leakey but, thereafter, Mary's dominant role in the research was acknowledged. In 1962 she began her annual lecture tours in the U.S.A. to raise funds for research; she was elected an Ordinary Fellow of the Society in 1967 and in 1968 she received an honorary doctorate from the university of Witwatersrand, her first academic qualification, which was followed by many other doctorates, including Yale, Columbia, Oxford and Cambridge. The Leakeys had never been ideal partners. Their three sons were now grown up and, until his death in 1972, Louis remained at the family house in Nairobi and Mary made Olduvai her permanent home. Her research report, Olduvai Gorge, vol. 3, Excavation in Beds I and II, appeared in l971 and in 1974 she began to excavate at Laetoli, about an hour's drive from Olduvai, in search of hominid fossil footprints; in 1978 she was rewarded by the recovery of a fine example of Australopithecus afarensis. At around 3.7 million years old, these prints in solidified volcanic ash are still the earliest direct evidence that hominids of this antiquity could walk upright in a heel-toe stride. Only months before her death at the age of eighty-three, after learning that the Tanzanian government and the Getty Conservation Institute had agreed to protect the footprints with a high-tech synthetic covering, she travelled to Laetoli for a final look at her last great discovery, before returning to the solitude of her beloved Olduvai, its wild life, on which she was a considerable expert, her pack of pedigree dalmations and her collection of detective stories. An authority on East African rock art, her book Africa's Vanishing Art: the Rock Paintings of Tanzania came out in 1983 and Olduvai Gorge, vol. 5 Excavations in Beds III, IV and the Masek Beds, 1968-71, was published jointly with D. A. Roe, F.S.A, in 1994, almost thirty years after Louis Leakey produced volume 1 in 1965. In the words of the reviewer in Antiquaries Journal, vol. 76, this publication is `not only a grand monument to work well done but a stimulus to future work'. Mary Leakey died on 9 December 1996 having expressed a wish that her ashes be scattered at Olduvai.