Mary Douglas Nichol Leakey

Born in London, she lived and worked most of her life in Africa, discovering and recording the fossil evidence of some of our earliest ancestors. She was a gifted artist who sketched and meticulously catalogued all of her discoveries. Her artistic talents were discovered by Dr. Gertrude Canton-Thompson, who asked her to illustrate her book The Desert Fayoum. At the Royal Anthropological Institute, Dr. Canton-Thompson introduced Mary Nichol to Louis Leakey, who was also very impressed by her talents and invited her to illustrate his work, Adam’s Ancestors. They were soon married in 1934, and worked together in Africa for most of the rest of their married life.

Mary’s most notable discoveries include the skull of Proconsul africanus in Kenya 1947-48, the skull of an early hominid dubbed Zinjanthropus in Olduvai Gorge in 1959, and 3.5 million-year-old footprints in Laetoli in 1976. Her discovery of "Zinj" led to support from the National Geographic Society in the U.S. She also received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1951, which enabled her to eventually produce her book Africa’s Vanishing Art (1983) which centers on 1,500 year-old Tanzanian rock paintings. Although she never achieved formal university training, Mary did receive many awards and honorary degrees for her lifetime of work and commitment to the field of anthropology.

"Once she summed up her career simply: 'I dug things up.  I was curious.  And then I liked to draw what I found" (The Detroit News 12/10/96).

Selected Works by or about Mary Leakey

Leakey, Mary

1979    Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man. London: Collins

1979    3-6 Million Years Old: Footprints in the Ashes of Time. National Geographic 155(4): 446-457.

1984    Disclosing the Past. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.

Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett

1934    Adam’s Ancestors: The Evolution of Man and His Culture. New York: Harper and Row.

William, Barbara

1981    Breakthrough: Women in Anthropology. New York: Walker Publishing Co.

Links of Interest

*Expedia Map of Olduvai Gorge

*National Museum of Kenya

*Hominid Fossils

*Hominid Species

Sources
Cole, Sonia
1975    Leakey’s Luck. New York: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich.

Holloway, Marguerite
1996    Profile: Mary Leakey. Scientific American. October Pp. 37.

Jurmain, Robert and Harry Nelson
1994    Introduction to Physical Anthropology 6^th edition. St. Paul: West Publishing Company.

Leakey, Mary
1984    Disclosing the Past. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.