Rocky Road: Mary Leakey

Mary Leakey

From Bones of Contention by Roger Lewin © John Reader

For much of the latter half of the 20th century, the study of human origins has been synonymous with one name: Louis Leakey. Yet, as his son Richard Leakey observed, Louis's fame would not have been possible without his wife Mary.

When Mary Leakey (originally Mary Nicol) was little, her artistic father took her to see ancient cave paintings in France, inspiring her interest in both art and early humans. Her father died when she was still quite young, and the rebellious girl managed to get herself expelled twice. She didn't pursue an academic degree, but she began working on archaeological expeditions at the age of 17, and her intelligence eventually caught the attention of her future husband, already a well known researcher, who asked her to illustrate a book. Louis and Mary soon fell in love.

After a scandalous separation from his first wife, Louis took Mary Nicol to Africa, and they toiled for many years without much success. While Louis looked for fossils, Mary concentrated primarily on stone tools, although she made significant fossil finds. In 1948 she found Proconsul, a 16 million-year-old link between monkeys and apes. In 1959, Louis Leakey found sudden fame (and long-term funding) with the discovery of Australopithecus boisei, formally named after a benefactor (Charles Boise) and nicknamed Zinj. Academics and reporters usually mentioned as an afterthought that it was really his wife who found the fossil. In 1978, Mary Leakey made another remarkable find: the Laetoli footprints in Tanzania. These footprints provided definitive proof that hominids walked upright as much as 3.6 million years ago.

The passion that characterized Mary's early marriage to Louis Leakey gradually waned, and the couple assumed a businesslike relationship. Louis was often away managing other projects or raising funds, and Mary Leakey kept excavating at Olduvai Gorge until 1984. Unlike her husband, she took a methodical approach to her work, and over the years, her careful analysis won her several honorary degrees, the Golden Linnaean Medal, and membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Mary Leakey's acceptance of her first honorary doctorate changed her her relationship with Louis. Before she became Dr. Leakey, Mary often directed scientific inquiries to her husband, and kept quiet when she disagreed with his interpretations. Afterwards, she was more independent, though she still remained reticent. "I never felt interpretation was my job," she once remarked in an interview with Scientific American. "There is so much we do not know, and the more we do know, the more we realize that early interpretations were completely wrong."

By the time Louis Leakey died in 1972, he and Mary had effectively been separated for years, and she wasn't always on the friendliest terms with her sons, either. As the years passed, she became known for liking animals far better than people. Gaggles of Dalmations followed her everywhere, and hyraxes roamed her dinner table, at liberty to munch on the meals of her nervous human guests. As for people, she maintained a "Stinkers' List" of individuals she couldn't abide, and preferred dining alone to slumming around the campfire with her workers. She permitted neither singing nor idle chatter on her digs. Yet she retained a close circle of friends throughout her life, and her scientific contributions more than made up for her sometimes prickly personality. In 1996, Mary Leakey died at the age of 83.

For more information:
Mary Leakey: Unearthing History (http://www.sciam.com/explorations/121696explorations.html)
Ancestral Passions by Virginia Morell
Bones of Contention by Roger Lewin
Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas
Lucy's Child by Donald Johanson
The Ape in the Tree by Walker and Shipman
The Complete World of Human Evolution by Stringer and Andrews
Great Feuds in Science by Hal Hellman
In the Footsteps of Eve by Lee R. Berger