Mary Douglas Nicol Leakey 1913-1996

Despite her lack of formal education, Mary Leakey stands out as one of the premiere
archaeologists--let alone female archaeologists--of this century. Although Mary's research is
often talked about in conjunction with that of her archaeologist husband and sons, her major
finds are more than enough to gain her personal acknowledgment. These finds include the
first Proconsul Africanus skull in 1948, the discovery of Zinjanthropus Boise (Australopithecus
Boise) in 1959, and the Laetoli hominid footprints in 1978. Until her recent death on
December 9, 1996, at age 83, Mary spent most of her days in the fields of Africa in pursuit of
such archaeological treasures, sorting through ancient stone tools, recording prehistoric rock
paintings, and hunting for fossil clues that might help piece together the mystery of mankind's
evolution.

Mary Douglas Nicol was born on February 6, 1913 in London to Erskine Edward
Nicol, a landscape painter, and Cecilia Marion Frere, an amateur artist. Her father had a huge
interest in archaeology and Egyptology; one of his closest friends in Egypt was Howard Carter,
known for his discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. Through her father's interest, Mary was
exposed to archaeology at a very early age. When her family moved to France they visited
many sites of cave art and befriended the prehistorian, M. Elie Peyrony of Les Eyzies, who
would allow father and daughter to accompany him on his excavations and keep whatever
small finds they happened upon. Mary describes the experience as "powerfully and magically
exciting... [finding] treasure we could take home and keep." This period first sparked her love
of archaeology. Her interest was further kindled through Abbé Lemozi, a priest and respected
amateur archaeologist, who taught her about French cave art and ancient stone tools. After
her father died when she was 13, Mary's mother tried to enroll her in a London convent
school; however, Mary found the school to be "wholly unconnected with the realities of life"
and soon left. Realizing that her lack of a formal education might hinder her plans to be a field
archeologist, at age 17 Mary began writing to various archaeologists to offer her services
assisting at digs, seeing this as her only way to gain fieldwork experience.

After numerous rejections, she finally received a letter of acceptance from Dorothy
Liddell who was in charge of excavations at Windmill Hill, an important stone age site.
Working as one of Miss Liddell's personal assistants, Mary dug regularly at the site and also
sketched a number of the finds for publication. These sketches brought her to the notice of
Dr. Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1932-33 who asked Mary to draw the stone tools for her
book, The Desert Fayoum. A little while later, Caton-Thompson, who had become a close
friend, invited Mary to a dinner party honoring the archaeologist Louis Leakey who was
lecturing at the Royal Anthropological institute. Mary was always first to say that it was not
love at first sight, but through the course of that evening, the two began talking with each
other, and Louis asked Mary to do the drawings for his book, Adam's Ancestors. Less than a
year later, Louis left his wife, Frida, and two children, Priscilla and Colin. He headed for
Tanzania in October 1934, where Mary joined him the following April. They were married
Christmas Eve 1936 in Ware, England.
 Louis took two years off from field work shortly after their marriage to gather
information on the Kikuyu tribe as part of a project dedicated to recording the tribe's ancient
customs before they were forgotten. During this period, Mary worked excavating Hyrax Hill,
a Neolithic site in an area near Lake Nakuru, Kenya. Her finds there included obsidian and
iron tools as well as remnants of stone walled houses and nineteen burial mounds. More
importantly, the excavation finally won her recognition as a professional archaeologist.
However, a published report of her findings was delayed until 1945 because of the outbreak of
war.

In 1939, British Intelligence recruited Louis to work counteracting the spread of anti-
British propaganda in Kenya. Mary continued her fieldwork, now working at the Naivasha
Railway Rock Shelter near Nairobi. This was a job of "rescue archaeology" producing prolific,
but not thrilling specimens; thousands of stone tools and millions of waste flakes were
recovered but never properly sorted or recorded due to a termite invasion which destroyed the
artifacts' cardboard storage boxes. Soon, Mary had to take a break from fieldwork to give birth
to her and Louis's first son, Jonathan Harry Erskine Leakey, born November 4, 1940. As soon
as Jonathan was a little older, Mary once again took up work excavating several sites.

One of the most exciting of these sites was Olorgesailie, located south of Nairobi. One
area of this site displayed such a rich collection of handaxe artifacts that Mary and Louis felt it
would be a shame to disturb it even to excavate it; Mary remembers the tools looking "as if
they had only just been abandoned by their makers." In 1947, this untouched spot was made
into an open-air museum. In the areas that the Leakeys did decide to excavate, they found not
only hundreds of stone tools, but also what they believed to be "living floors," or actual
campsites left by Acheulean (handaxe culture) hunters; however, these were later found to be
merely accumulations of tools in ancient stream channels. For these digs, the Leakeys
employed labor teams of Italian prisoners of war and uncovered many artifacts dated as much
as 900,000 years old. Still, Mary became disappointed with the site, as in the next 10 years it
proved nearly impossible to correlate the trenches she uncovered, connecting them through
time; partly because of this, she never published reports on Olorgesailie.

Through these war years, the family continued to change and grow. In January of
1943, Mary gave birth to a daughter, Deborah, who died a short three months later of
dysentery. However, on December 24, 1944, another baby arrived, Richard Erskine Frere
Leakey, and the end of the war found Mary excavating as usual, though now accompanied by
two sons, their nurses, and several adored Dalmatians.

After the war, the Leakeys spent several years on Rusinga Island, just off the west coast
of Lake Victoria. On the morning of October 6, 1948, Mary discovered some interesting bone
fragments and a tooth buried in the side of a cliff. During the next two days, she found enough
pieces to reconstruct the skull and jaws of an apelike creature from the Miocene era called
Proconsul Africanus. This 18-million-year-old skull turned out to be one of the oldest and
most important finds discovered in Africa up to that point; although not the "missing link"
the Leakeys had been hoping to find, Proconsul Africanus is a possible ancestor of humans, and
both great and lesser apes. Bits and pieces of the species had been found before, but never
anything as complete as Mary's specimen. Aside from the public interest it spurred, the skull
also ensured the Leakeys funding for their next expeditions. Louis and Mary, thrilled at the
discovery, decided the best way to celebrate would be by having another child. Their third son,
Philip, was born almost nine months later on June 21, 1949.

In the 1950s, the Leakeys' excavation plans were once again interrupted-this time by
political turmoil in Kenya. Mary saw this as a chance to return to a site she had once visited in
Tanzania, and record the detailed Stone Age paintings that abounded there. The change from
stone and bone surroundings delighted her; in her own words, "here were scenes of life of men
and women hunting, dancing, singing and playing music." She traced, redrew and painted
some 1600 figures, which she later published in a book called Africa's Vanishing Art.
Unfortunately, when the population density in this area of Tanzania increased, reverence for
the sites decreased and as a result many paintings were badly defaced or damaged, picked at by
bored, unthinking herd-boys. This adds an even greater documentary importance to Mary's
beautiful reproductions.

Although she enjoyed this artistic interlude to her career, Mary soon found herself
back in the dirt, this time excavating in Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania. Louis had first
visited the gorge in 1931 and was overwhelmed by the wealth of archaeological material
existing there, but for many years he lacked the money to initiate a proper excavation. Finally,
in 1951, with some monetary assistance from Charles Boise, the Leakeys were able to establish
a base camp and begin their investigations. The next seven years brought steady progress but
no incredible finds. Then, the morning of July 17, 1959, Mary was walking through site FLK
with her Dalmatians (Louis was sick at camp with the flu), when she caught sight of what
looked like a hominid skull protruding from the ground. On closer investigation, she saw that
two teeth were still intact in the upper jaw and that everything appeared in situ. She'd
discovered "Zinjanthropus" (later named Australopithecus Boise). Scientists agree that "Zinj" is
on an evolutionary side branch-not a direct human ancestor; however, the 1.75-million-year-
old specimen was the first of his species ever found, and at the time of his discovery, the oldest
hominid. Mary says in her autobiography, "two major discoveries marked turning points in my
life, the finding of Proconsul in 1948, and the finding of Zinj in 1959."

The discovery of Zinj did bring many changes to the Leakeys' lives. Not only did it
spur widespread popular support of the Leakeys and of archaeology in general, but it also
influenced the National Geographic Society to provide them with large scale financial
support. Then in 1962, Mary and Louis both received gold Hubbard Awards-the National
Geographic Society's highest honor. Although Zinj was Mary's most exciting discovery at
Olduvai, the site also yielded many other archaeological gems. One of these was actually
discovered by her eldest son, Jonathan. On November 2, 1960, he found a young hominid's
lower jaw and some pieces of skull. Mary then found some hand bones of this same specimen
dubbed "Jonny's Child." This turned out to be the first example ever found of Homo Habilis, a
creature older than Zinj and possibly the first hominid to make stone tools. Even after this
find, the gorge kept revealing enough archaeological material to keep Mary there for almost
another decade.

Beginning around 1968, Mary and Louis were seldom together; she worked at
Olduvai while he constantly traveled. During this period, both Louis's health and the Leakey
marriage were fast deteriorating. On October 1, 1972, Louis finally died of a heart attack after
years of painful infirmity. Mary, no longer working in her husband's shadow, went on to
excavate one of the most important sites of her life.
Mary first visited Laetoli, an area 30 miles south of Olduvai, in 1935 but didn't establish a
permanent site there until 1974. In July of 1975, the first serious excavations began. Early digs
revealed an abundance of hominid materials which were dated (by finding the age of overlying
lava flows) at more than 2.4-million-years-old, placing them much earlier in time than any
found at Olduvai. An even more exciting find occurred in 1976 when visitors to the site
accidentally stumbled upon what seemed like fossilized animal prints. "Site A," as it came to be
called, ended up containing almost 18,400 individual prints. Then, in 1978, two short parallel
trails of hominid prints were found by a man named Paul Abell, again by accident. Eventually,
these trails were found to extend more than 80 ft in rock that was dated at 3.6-million-years-
old. The prints were made by two individuals walking side-by-side, with a third deliberately
stepping in the footprints of the largest individual; Mary liked to believe that they were of the
genus Homo, but other scientists, including Donald Johanson (of "Lucy" fame) think they
might be of the Australopithecus line. (In fact, this was a big point of contention in a vicious
feud between Leakey and Johanson.) Despite all of the questions that the footprints raised,
and that remain unanswered even today, Mary deemed their discovery as one of the most
important made in her lifetime. For instance, the absence of stone tools at the site leads
scientists to believe that bipedalism preceded the use of tools. Mary later explained, "The
discovery of the trails was immensely exciting-something so extraordinary that I could hardly
take it in or comprehend its implications for some while." After their excavation, Mary
finished her stay at Laetoli, ending also the most memorable stage of her archaeological career.

Mary spent the remaining years of her life lecturing, fund raising and touring. She also
collected more than enough honorary degrees to make up for her lack of an official college
diploma, from places such as the University of Chicago, Yale and Oxford. She was awarded
the Linnaeus Medal at a symposium hosted by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and
the Gold Medal of the Society of Women Geographers in Washington among other honors.
In 1982, a blood clot caused blindness in her left eye; despite this, she published her
autobiography, Disclosing the Past, in 1984, and continued to work at various excavations in
Kenya and at Olduvai until close to her death in 1996. In her autobiography, Mary explains
that through her whole career she was "impelled by curiosity." She writes that other
archaeologists should try to satisfy their curiosities by hunting for more concrete evidence,
rather than spending all their time formulating crazy hypotheses based on a few random scraps
of bone. In her words, "Small pieces of the record have been preserved and can sometimes be
found, but it cannot be stressed too strongly that they are indeed small parts and what we
uncover may give us a biased view of the picture as a whole."
Texts by Mary Leakey:

• Africa's Vanishing Art: The Rock Paintings of Tanzania. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1983.
• Disclosing the Past. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984.
• Excavation of Burial Mounds in Ngorongoro Crater. Arusha: Printed by Tanzania
Litho, 1966
• Excavations at the Njoro River Cave; Stone Age Cremated Burials in Kenya Colony.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950.
• Laetoli; A Pliocene Site in Northern Tanzania. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
• Report on the Excavations at Hyrax Hill, Nakuru, Kenya County, 1937-1938. Cape
Town: Printed by the Society, 1945.
• Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man. London, 1979.

Other Helpful Sources:

• Morell, Virginia. Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for
Humankind's Beginnings. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
• Leakey, Richard. One Life: Richard E. Leakey. Salem: Salem House, 1984.

Last updated: 19 March 1997

Created by:Jenny Dente
Please send comments to: jmdente@mail.utexas.edu