View entry
Name: LEAKEY, Mary Douglas
Nee: Nicol
Birth Date: 6 Feb 1913 London
Death Date: 9 Dec 1996 Nairobi
Profession: Palaeoanthropologist
Married: In Wareham 25 Dec 1936 Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-1972)
Children: Jonathan Harry Erskine (4 Nov 1940 Nairobi-2022); Richard Erskine Frere (19 Dec 1944 Nairobi-2 Jan 2022); Philip (1948)
General Information:
Wikipedia: discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetoli footprints, and at the Laetoli site she discovered hominin fossils that were more than 3.75 million years old. During her career, Leakey discovered fifteen new species of animal. She also brought about the naming of a new genus.
In 1972, after the death of her husband, Leakey became director of excavations at Olduvai. She maintained the Leakey family tradition of palaeoanthropology by training her son, Richard, in the field.
The Nicols spent much of their time in southern France where young Mary became fluent in French. In 1925, when Mary was 12, the Nicols stayed at the commune, Les Eyzies, at a time when Elie Peyrony, a French archeologist and prehistorian, was excavating one of the caves there. Peyrony was not excavating scientifically during that early stage of archaeology and did not understand the significance of much of what he found. Mary received permission to go through the remnants of his dig and this was where her interests in prehistory and archaeology were sparked. She started a collection of points, scrapers, and blades from the dump and developed her first system of classification. n the spring of 1926, when Mary was thirteen years old, her father died of cancer and Mary and her mother returned to London. Mary was placed in a local Catholic convent to be educated, and she later boasted of never passing an examination there.[lthough she spoke fluent French, Mary did not excel at French language studies, apparently because her teacher frowned upon her provincial accent. She was expelled for refusing to recite poetry, and was later expelled from a second convent school for causing an explosion in a chemistry laboratory. After the second expulsion, her mother hired two tutors, who were no more successful than the nuns. After the unsuccessful tutors, her mother hired a nanny. Through Caton Thompson, an English archeologist, Mary met Louis Leakey, who was in need of an illustrator for his book Adam's Ancestors (1934). While she was doing that work they became romantically involved. Leakey was still married and his son Collin had just been born when they moved in with each other. They married after Frida Leakey divorced him in 1936.