Mary Leakey, Who Pointed Us Toward Our Origins, Dies
Mary Leakey, an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist who devoted her life to unraveling the origin and early development of mankind and single-handedly pushed that evolution back millions of years, died Monday in Nairobi, Kenya. She was 83.
The death of the woman considered the “unsung hero” of the Leakey team with her late husband, Louis, was announced by their scientist son, Richard, in Nairobi.
It was Mary Leakey who actually found the skull in 1959 in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania which assured the Leakeys’ place in history and secured funding from the National Geographic Society for their lifetime research.
In 1948, it also had been Mary Leakey who made the couple’s first major discovery, an apelike skull of a human ancestor, Proconsul Africanus. That fossilized skull did much to promote East Africa as the crucible of human beings.
She finally achieved solo fame as a stellar international scientist in 1978, six years after the death of her husband, with her discovery of a 23-meter-long trail at Laetoli, Tanzania, of hominid footprints preserved in volcanic ash that dated back 3.6 million years. Her “find” proved that early man had walked upright far earlier than had been believed.
Over half a century, Mary Leakey labored under the hot African sun, scratching in the dirt for clues to early human physical and cultural evolution. Scientists in her field said she set the standards for documentation and excavation in paleolithic archaeology. They spoke of hers as a life of enviable achievement.
“She was one of the world’s great originals,” said Dr. Alan Walker, an anatomist at Pennsylvania State University who has long excavated fossils with the Leakey family. “Untrained except in art, she developed techniques of excavation and descriptive archaeology and did it all on her own in the middle of Africa. It was an extraordinary life.”
In a biography of the Leakey family, “Ancestral Passions,” published last year by Simon & Schuster, Virginia Morell characterized Mary Leakey as “the grand dame of archaeology.”
Beginning in the 1930s, Mary Leakey and her late husband, Louis, awakened the world to Africa’s primary place in human origins with their spectacular discoveries and increasingly pushed back the time of those origins much earlier than had been thought. Until then, many scientists still believed the human birthplace would be found in Asia.
She discovered the skull of Proconsul africanus, an apelike ancestor of both apes and early humans that lived about 25 million years ago. In 1959, her discovery of a well-preserved skull of a hominid, a member of the extended human ancestral family, brought fame and substantial financial backing to the Leakeys. A few years later, the two Leakeys uncovered the fossils of the first known member of the genus Homo habilis, or “able man,” in recognition of the many stone tools found among the bones.
From then on, the name Leakey was synonymous with the study of human origins. The flamboyant Louis seemed to know just where to look to find revealing fossils; the envious spoke of “Leakey’s luck.” Meanwhile, Mary Leakey worked in her husband’s shadow, seeing to the plodding excavations and meticulous documentation of their finds.
“Louis was always a better publicist than scientist,” said E. Barton Worthington, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London and former African explorer. “Mary was the real fossil hunter.”
After Louis Leakey’s death in 1972, Mary Leakey overcame some of her natural shyness to assume direction of the family fossil enterprise, which by then one of their sons, Richard, joined as an expedition leader. Her operations centered on Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli, both in Tanzania. On the arid plain of Laetoli, she made her most sensational discovery in 1978: the earliest footprints of a human ancestor.
The animals had walked over volcanic ash when it was damp from rain, leaving impressions of their feet. The wet ash set like concrete and was later covered over by more ash and silt.
It was two years before a scientist uncovered a heel print that hinted of an even more significant find. It seemed to belong to a hominid. On Aug. 2, 1978, Leakey spent three hours examining one of the clearest of these prints. She cleaned the crevices of the print with a small brush and dental pick. All the important elements were preserved: heel, toes and arch. She appraised the print from every possible angle.
Finally, Leakey stood up from her work, lit a cigar and announced, “Now this really is something to put on the mantelpiece.”
She was at last sure that a hominid had left this print and a trail of prints across the plain. Two and possibly three individuals had walked this way 3.6 million years ago: the larger one, presumably a male; the smaller one, presumably female; and an even smaller individual, perhaps their child, whose prints are sometimes superimposed on the others.
Somewhere along the way, as Leakey noted, the female appeared to pause and turn to her left. She might have sensed danger, possibly from a predator or the rumble of a volcanic eruption nearby. Then she resumed her walk to the north.
“This motion, so intensely human, transcends time,” Leakey wrote in the National Geographic Magazine. “A remote ancestor - just as you or I - experienced a moment of doubt.”
These evocative footprints are the earliest known traces of human behavior. At the time, the discovery established that human ancestors had begun walking upright much earlier than previously thought, long before the evolution of larger brains. Whether upright walking preceded the larger brain, or vice versa, was still a much-debated issue among scholars.
With the discovery of a species called Australopithecus afarensis, based on the famous Lucy skeleton, the most likely identity of these prehistoric strollers was established. The species lived between 3.9 million and 3 million years ago, and from the fossils paleontologists have determined that they were as capable of walking upright as modern humans.
“I think it’s the most important find in view of human evolution,” Leakey was quoted by The Associated Press as saying in an interview in September. “I was really looking for tools, but we never found any at the site.”
She was born Mary Douglas Nicol on Feb. 6, 1913, in London. Her father, Erskine Nicol, was a prolific and fairly successful landscape painter, as was his father before him. Her mother, Cecilia Marion Frere, was a descendant of John Frere, a British prehistorian who in 1797 first recognized Stone Age flint implements as primitive tools and weapons.
At the age of 20, Mary Nicol, a sometime illustrator of stone tools and occasional participant in archaeological digs, met Louis Leakey, 10 years her senior, married and an established figure in African archaeology with a position at Cambridge University. He asked her to help him with drawings for a book, and she readily agreed. A romance followed, and then scandal.
They would marry as soon as his divorce came through. Meanwhile, they did nothing to conceal the intimacy of their relationship, living together for more than a year in a cottage near Cambridge. This eventually cost him his post at Cambridge.
The two were married in 1936 and set out for Africa, where he had grown up as the son of British missionaries. As Leakey wrote later, she was never the same again after “Africa had cast its spell” on her. Much of their marriage was spent at dig sites.
From 1968 until his death in 1972, Mary and Louis Leakey were separated. He spent more and more of his time in the celebrity whirl, raising money and lecturing in Britain and the United States, while she stuck to her digging at Olduvai. She was becoming more independent intellectually and emotionally, opposing some of her husband’s more sensational interpretations of discoveries.
“I ended by losing my professional respect for Louis; and it had been very great indeed,” she wrote. “Once that was so I was no longer able to offer the concurrence and unquestioning adulation he now seemed to demand.”
Leakey retired from field work in 1983, still smoking cigars and accompanied by her beloved Dalmatians. She is survived by her three sons, Jonathan, Richard and Philip, all of Kenya, and by 10 grandchildren.