LEAKEY, MARY DOUGLAS

ne Nicol born Feb. 6, 1913, London, Eng. died Dec. 9, 1996, Nairobi, Kenya English-born archaeologist and paleoanthropologist who made several of the most important fossil finds subsequently interpreted and publicized by her husband, the noted anthropologist Louis Leakey. As a girl she exhibited a natural talent for drawing and was interested in archaeology. After undergoing sporadic schooling, she participated in excavations of a Neolithic site at Hembury, Devon, Eng., by which time she had become skilled at making reproduction-quality drawings of stone tools. She met Louis Leakey in 1933, they were married in 1936, and she bore three surviving children. Working alongside her husband for the next 30 years, Mary Leakey oversaw the excavation of various prehistoric sites in Kenya. In 1948 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 she discovered at Olduvai Gorge the skull of an early hominid named Zinjanthropus by Louis Leakey, though it is now regarded as a type of australopithecine. In 1978 she discovered at Laetoli, a site south of Olduvai Gorge, several sets of footprints made in volcanic ash by early hominids who lived about 3.5 million years ago. The footprints indicated that their makers walked upright; this discovery pushed back the advent of human bipedalism to a date earlier than had previously been suspected by the scientific community. Among Mary Leakey's books were Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man (1979) and the autobiographical Disclosing the Past (1984).