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Mary Leakey

Primate Info Net: Mary Leakey, archaeologist and anthropologist Mary Leakey, archaeologist and anthropologist London Times, December 10, 1996 Mary Leakey, archaeologist and anthropologist, died in Nairobi yesterday aged 83. She was born on February 6, 1913. MARY LEAKEY was the scientific anchor without which her husband, the anthropologist Louis Leakey, might have been dismissed as a mere controversialist with an exotic private life. For every vivid claim made by Louis about the origins of man, the supporting evidence tended to come from Mary, whose scrupulous scientific approach contrasted with his taste for publicity and enjoyment of personal battles. After his death in 1972, she enjoyed her most spectacular find, three trails of fossilised hominid footprints 3.6 million years old, which she discovered at Laetoli in Tanzania in 1978 and 1979. These showed that man's ancestors were already walking upright at a much earlier period than most anthropologists had believed. "At one point," wrote Mary Leakey of one of these tracks, "she stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time." Born in London, she was the daughter of the landscape painter Erskine Nicol, who died when she was 13. Much of her childhood was spent in France, and it was the cave paintings of the Dordogne, to which her father introduced her, that kindled her interest in prehistory and her talent for drawing prehistoric artefacts. "I dug things up," she later explained. "I was curious, and then I liked to draw what I found. The first money I ever earned was for drawing stone tools." After seeing some of her work, Louis Leakey asked her to illustrate his book Adam's Ancestors and soon after she accompanied him to Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. He was already married, with two small children, but after a painful divorce he married Mary in 1936 and they made their home in East Africa. He was

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