Mary Leakey was a British archaeologist and anthropologist, who discovered the first fossilized Proconsul skull, an extinct ape now believed to be ancestral to humans, and also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge.
For much of her career she worked together with her husband, Louis Leakey, in Olduvai Gorge, uncovering the tools and fossils of ancient hominines.
She developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She also discovered the Laetoli footprints. In 1960 she became director of
excavation at Olduvai and subsequently took it over, building her own staff.
After the death of her husband, she became a leading palaeoanthropologist, helping to establish the Leakey tradition by training her son, Richard, in the field.
In the spring of 1926, in Mary's 13th year, her father died of cancer. The services were read by Lemozi. Erskine's brother, Percy, came to take them back to London.
Cecilia sold Erskine's paintings and moved to a boardinghouse in Kensington. She placed Mary in a local Catholic convent to be educated, following the example of her own life. Later, Mary boasted of never passing an examination there.
Mary could not even excel at French, although she spoke it fluently, because her teacher frowned upon her provincial accent. She was expelled for refusing to recite poetry, and then expelled from a second convent school for causing an explosion in a chemistry laboratory.
After the second expulsion her mother hired two tutors, who were no more successful than the nuns, and mother and daughter visited Stonehenge. Mary's only particular interests were drawing and archaeology.
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| Louis Leakey |
Formal university admission was impossible with Mary's academic record.
Her mother contacted a professor at Oxford University about possible admission. After being informed that it was not even worth her time applying, Mary had no further contact with the university until it awarded her an honorary doctoral degree in 1951. So the small family moved to Kensington where she could attend lectures unregistered in archaeology and related subjects at University College London and the London Museum, where she studied under Mortimer Wheeler.
She applied to a number of excavations to be held in the summer. Wheeler was the first to accept her for a dig at St. Albans at the Roman site of Verulamium. Mary's second dig was at Hembury, a Neolithic site, under Dorothy Liddell, who coached her for four years. Mary's illustrations of tools for Dorothy drew the attention of Gertrude Caton-Thompson, and in late 1932 she entered the field as an illustrator for Caton-Thompson's book, The Desert Fayoum.
