London Times, December 10, 1996
Mary Leakey, archaeologist and anthropologist, died in
Nairobi yesterday aged 83. She was born on February 6, 1913.
MARY LEAKEY was the scientific anchor without which her
husband, the anthropologist Louis Leakey, might have been dismissed
as a mere controversialist with an exotic private life. For every
vivid claim made by Louis about the origins of man, the supporting
evidence tended to come from Mary, whose scrupulous scientific
approach contrasted with his taste for publicity and enjoyment of
personal battles.
After his death in 1972, she enjoyed her most spectacular find,
three trails of fossilised hominid footprints 3.6 million years
old, which she discovered at Laetoli in Tanzania in 1978 and 1979.
These showed that man's ancestors were already walking upright at
a much earlier period than most anthropologists had believed. "At
one point," wrote Mary Leakey of one of these tracks, "she stops,
pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or
irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so
intensely human, transcends time."
Born in London, she was the daughter of the landscape painter
Erskine Nicol, who died when she was 13. Much of her childhood was
spent in France, and it was the cave paintings of the Dordogne, to
which her father introduced her, that kindled her interest in
prehistory and her talent for drawing prehistoric artefacts. "I dug
things up," she later explained. "I was curious, and then I
liked to draw what I found. The first money I ever earned was for
drawing stone tools."
After seeing some of her work, Louis Leakey asked her to
illustrate his book Adam's Ancestors and soon after she accompanied
him to Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. He was already married, with two
small children, but after a painful divorce he married Mary in 1936
and they made their home in East Africa. He was not to prove the
easiest of husbands.
Mary Douglas Leakey had gained archaeological experience at
Hembury Fort in Devon and at Jaywick Sands in East Anglia. In 1937
she excavated Hyrax Hill near Nakuru in Kenya, an early Iron Age
site, publishing the results in a long paper in the Transactions
of the Royal Society of South Africa. Her competence as an
archaeologist was then widely recognised. Her next important work
was at Olorgesailie, near Nairobi, an Acheulean site with
spectacular concentrations of handaxes and fossil fauna. Here for
the first time the actual living sites of early man were
discovered.
In 1948 Mary found on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria the skull
of Proconsul africanus, a 16 million-year-old Miocene ape and at
that time the only fossil ape skull known. This she painstakingly
reconstructed from innumerable fragments. At Olduvai in 1959 she
repeated the feat, piecing together her most spectacular find, the
skull of Australopithecus (Zinjanthropus) boisei from more than 400
tiny fragments. Later, by the newly developed potassium-argon
dating technique, "Zinj" was dated to 1.7 million years and was in
fact the first australopithecine skull to be dated.
This discovery was the beginning of world renown for the
Leakeys and, more important for them, financial support from the
National Geographic Society of Washington for their work at
Olduvai, which had previously been done on the proverbial
shoestring. It also proved the beginning of Mary's long association
with Olduvai as her permanent home. Here she could devote her time
to research and writing, and enjoy her love of solitude. She shared
her life with a pack of dalmatian dogs and many other animals both
tame and wild, which were her other great interest equalled only
by stone tools.
The detailed plans of hominid living sites that she made were
unique at that time and were published in her book, Excavations in
Beds I and II, volume three of the Olduvai Gorge monographs (1971).
Apart from many papers in Nature and other scientific journals, her
publications included a popular account of her life at Olduvai in
Olduvai Gorge: my search for early man (1979).
Since her first visit to the United States in 1962 to receive
the National Geographic Society's gold Hubbard medal jointly with
her husband, Mary made yearly lecture tours of the US to raise
money for research. She was awarded a number of medals, and
honorary doctorates of science from the Universities of the
Witwatersrand, Yale and Chicago, as well as a DLitt from Oxford.
She was a Fellow of the British Academy.
She loved small Cuban cigars and single malt whiskies, and
preferred the outdoors to urban life. "Given the chance, I'd rather
be in a tent than in a house," she once said. In the world of
palaeoanthropology, where arguments often turn personal, she was
a stickler for proper behaviour, publishing careful and detailed
accounts of the evidence she had gathered. She only agreed to write
an autobiography - Disclosing the Past, published in 1984 - after
getting agreement that a book she had written on little-known rock
paintings at Kandoa, Tanzania, would also be published.
In August of this year, after the Tanzanian Government and the
Getty Conservation Institute had finally decided to protect the
hominid footprints beneath a high-tech synthetic covering, Mary
Leakey travelled to Laetoli for a final look at her great
discovery.
She is survived by her sons Jonathan, Richard and Philip.
Richard Leakey followed his parents into palaeontology, becoming
well-known for his researches east of Lake Turkana in Kenya. He
became active in Kenyan politics and is the secretary general of
the opposition Safina Party.
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company
December 10, 1996, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
HEADLINE: Mary Leakey, 83, Dies; Traced Human Dawn
BYLINE: By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Mary Leakey, matriarch of the famous fossil-hunting family in
Africa whose own reputation in paleoanthropology soared with
discoveries of bones, stone tools and the footprints of early human
ancestors, died yesterday in Nairobi, Kenya. She was 83.
Her family announced her death but did not give the cause,
saying only that she died peacefully.
Over half a century, Mary Leakey labored under the hot
African sun, scratching in the dirt for clues to early human
physical and cultural evolution. Scientists in her field said she
set the standards for documentation and excavation in paleolithic
archeology. They spoke of hers as a life of enviable achievement.
"She was one of the world's great originals," said Dr. Alan
Walker, an anatomist at Pennsylvania State University who has long
excavated fossils with the Leakey family. "Untrained except in art,
she developed techniques of excavation and descriptive archeology
and did it all on her own in the middle of Africa. It was an
extraordinary life."
In a biography of the Leakey family, "Ancestral Passions,"
published last year by Simon & Schuster, Virginia Morell
characterized Mary Leakey as "the grande dame of archeology."
Beginning in the 1930's, Mary Leakey and her late husband,
Louis, awakened the world to Africa's primary place in human
origins with their spectacular discoveries and increasingly pushed
back the time of those origins much earlier than had been thought.
Until then, many scientists still believed the human birthplace
would be found in Asia.
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, her discovery of a well-preserved skull of a
hominid, a member of the extended human ancestral family, brought
fame and substantial financial backing to the Leakeys. A few years
later, the two Leakeys uncovered the fossils of the first known
member of the genus Homo habilis, or "able man," in recognition of
the many stone tools found among the bones.
From then on, the name Leakey was synonymous with the study of
human origins. The flamboyant Louis seemed to know just where to
look to find revealing fossils; the envious spoke of "Leakey's
luck." Meanwhile, Mary Leakey worked in her husband's shadow,
seeing to the plodding excavations and meticulous documentation of
their finds.
"Louis was always a better publicist than scientist," said E.
Barton Worthington, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in
London and former African explorer. "Mary was the real fossil
hunter."
After Louis Leakey's death in 1972, Mary Leakey overcame some
of her natural shyness to assume direction of the family fossil
enterprise, which by then one of their sons, Richard, joined as an
expedition leader. Her operations centered on Olduvai Gorge and
Laetoli, both in Tanzania. On the arid plain of Laetoli, she made
her most sensational discovery in 1978: the earliest footprints of
a human ancestor.
A Playful Moment, But a Fateful One
As often happens, the discovery of the prints was made by chance
-- more Leakey luck. While tossing dried elephant dung in a playful
camp fight, one scientist on Mrs. Leakey's expedition fell down and
saw in the gray surface some curious indentations. They were
imprints of raindrops and animals, now hardened to stone and
recently exposed by erosion and weathering.
After further exploration, scientists determined that the tracks
were made about 3.7 million years ago. The animals had walked over
volcanic ash when it was damp from rain, leaving impressions of
their feet. The wet ash set like concrete and was later covered
over by more ash and silt. There the tracks remained to be found
by dung-throwing scientists.
It was two years before a scientist uncovered a heel print that
hinted of an even more significant find. It seemed to belong to a
hominid. On Aug. 2, 1978, Mrs. Leakey spent three hours examining
one of the clearest of these prints. She cleaned the crevices of
the print with a small brush and dental pick. All the important
elements were preserved: heel, toes and arch. She appraised the
print from every possible angle.
Finally, Mrs. Leakey stood up from her work, lit a cigar and
announced, "Now this really is something to put on the
mantelpiece."
She was at last sure that a hominid had left this print and a
trail of prints extending more than 75 feet across the plain. Two
and possibly three individuals had walked this way 3.7 million
years ago: the larger one, presumably a male; the smaller one,
presumably female, and an even smaller individual, perhaps
their child, whose prints are sometimes superimposed on the others.
In a Footprint a Clue To Human Behavior
Somewhere along the way, as Mrs. Leakey noted, the female
appeared to pause and turn to her left. She might have sensed
danger, possibly from a predator or the rumble of a volcanic
eruption nearby. Then she resumed her walk to the north.
"This motion, so intensely human, transcends time," Mrs. Leakey
wrote in the National Geographic magazine. "A remote ancestor --
just as you or I -- experienced a moment of doubt."
These evocative footprints are the earliest known traces of
human behavior. At the time, the discovery established that human
ancestors had begun walking upright much earlier than previously
thought, long before the evolution of larger brains. Whether
upright walking preceded the larger brain, or vice versa,
was still a much-debated issue among scholars.
With the discovery of a species called Australopithecus
afarensis, based on the famous Lucy skeleton, the most likely
identity of these prehistoric strollers was established. The
species lived between 3.9 million and 3 million years ago, and from
the fossils paleontologists have determined that they were
as capable of walking upright as modern humans.
"I think it's the most important find in view of human
evolution," Mrs. Leakey was quoted by The Associated Press as
saying in an interview in September. "I was really looking for
tools, but we never found any at the site."
In Stone Age Art, Two Interests Merged
She also looked back fondly on what she called another highlight
of her career. She was a budding artist before she met and later
married Mr. Leakey, when she turned to fossil hunting and
archeology. In 1951, her two interests merged briefly.
Mrs. Leakey recorded on drawing paper some 1,600 of the
thousands of late Stone Age paintings in the Kondoa-Irangi region
of Tanzania. The work gave her "a great sense of happiness and
well-being," she wrote in her autobiography, "Disclosing the Past,"
published in 1984, because the drawings afforded a glimpse of the
lives of the hunter-gatherers who painted them. "No amounts of
stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the
paintings gave so freely," she said.
One of her last books was a collection of these Stone Age
drawings, entitled "Africa's Vanishing Art: the Rock Paintings of
Tanzania" and published in 1983.
Art and, to some extent, prehistory were part of Mary Leakey's
heritage. She was born Mary Douglas Nicol on Feb. 6, 1913 in
London. Her father, Erskine Nicol, was a prolific and fairly
successful landscape painter, as was his father before him. Her
mother, Cecilia Marion Frere, was a descendant of John Frere, a
British prehistorian who in 1797 first recognized Stone Age flint
implements as primitive tools and weapons.
After World War I, the family spent months each year in
Switzerland, France or Italy, where the father painted and took
Mary to archeological ruins and the caves painted by Cro-Magnon
hunters. As she said, this was the source of her early interest in
archeology.
"Basically, I have been compelled by curiosity," she wrote in
her autobiography. But formal education was not for her.
Bored by class work and her fellow students, Mary was expelled
from two schools and so, with attending a university out of the
question, decided to pursue independent studies in drawing and
archeology. "I had never passed a single school exam, and clearly
never would," she wrote.
At the age of 20, Mary Nicol, a sometime illustrator of stone
tools and occasional participant in archeological digs, met Louis
Leakey, 10 years her senior, married and an established figure in
African archeology with a position at Cambridge University. He
asked her to help him with drawings for a book, and she readily
agreed. A romance followed, and then scandal.
Scandal in Cambridge Led to Magic of Africa
They would marry as soon as his divorce came through. Meanwhile,
they did nothing to conceal the intimacy of their relationship,
living together for more than a year in a cottage near Cambridge.
This eventually cost him his post at Cambridge, the memory of which
was dancing lightly through Mary Leakey's mind years later as she
walked up the aisle at Cambridge to receive an honorary doctorate
degree.
The two were married in 1936 and set out for Africa, where he
had grown up as the son of British missionaries. As Mrs. Leakey
wrote later, she was never the same again after "Africa had cast
its spell" on her. Much of their marriage was spent at dig sites.
"Given the chance, I'd rather be in a tent than in a house,"
she said in a recent interview with Associated Press.
It was a discovery by the Leakeys in 1959 that, according to Dr.
F. Clark Howell of the University of California at Berkeley, marked
"the beginnings of paleoanthropology in a modern sense." The pace
of exploration quickened. Geologists and anatomists joined the
quest, a multidisciplinary approach that the Leakeys did much to
promote.
On a July day in 1959, as Louis lay ill in camp, Mary stumbled
on some teeth and part of a jaw on a slope of Olduvai Gorge.
Rushing back to her husband, she exclaimed, "I've found him --
found our man."
How the couple celebrated is not recorded. But in her
autobiography, Mrs. Leakey wrote that after an earlier major find
they "cast aside care" and that was how their son Philip "came to
join our family."
The 1959 discovery turned out to be a 1.8 million-year-old
fossil known as the "nutcracker man" because of its huge jaws and
molar teeth. It was later designated Australopithecus boisei.
As Two Lives Diverged, A New Independence
From 1968 until Louis Leakey's death in 1972, he and Mary
Leakey were separated. He spent more and more of his time in the
celebrity whirl, raising money and lecturing, while she stuck to
her digging at Olduvai. She was becoming more independent, opposing
some of her husband's more sensational interpretations of
discoveries.
"I ended by losing my professional respect for Louis; and it had
been very great indeed," she wrote. "Once that was so I was no
longer able to offer the concurrence and unquestioning adulation
he now seemed to demand."
Another unsettling episode in her life was the controversy
between her and Richard Leakey, on one side, and Dr. Donald C.
Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy, on the other. She insisted on the
removal of her name from the joint authorship of a paper that made
assumptions about the place of the Lucy species human evolution.
Mrs. Leakey retired from fieldwork in 1983, still smoking small
Cuban cigars and accompanied by her beloved Dalmatians. Her honors
were many for a woman who never finished high school: medals from
the National Geographic Society, the Geological Society of London
and the Royal Swedish Academy and many honorary degrees.
She is survived by her three sons, Jonathan, Richard and Philip,
all of Kenya, and by 10 grandchildren.
URL: http://www.primate.wisc.edu/pin/leakey.html
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February 19, 2002
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