Mary Leakey

Mary Douglas Leakey (née Nicol, 6 February 1913 – 9 December 1996) was a British archaeologist and a founding figure in the field of modern paleoanthropology. Her career in African archaeology spanned over 60 years and focused mostly in sites in the East African Rift, from the first survey of Olduvai Gorge in 1934 until her death in 1996, having retired from fieldwork in 1984 after a blood clot left her blind in her left eye. She is credited with the classification of fifteen new animal species, one animal genus, and a series of major discoveries relating to early human evolution in East Africa, specifically the Great Rift Valley. Among these are the type specimens of Proconsul africanus (1948), Paranthropus boisei (1959), Homo habilis (1961), the Laetoli footprints (1976), and the modern typology of stone tools into industries of the Paleolithic. Leakey collaborated with her husband and fellow paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey (1903–1972) for most of her career. He received most–at times all–of the academic credit and publicity associated with their excavations during this period, a common experience of women in science in the 20th century. Strongly disliking the public eye, she performed and directed most of the actual archaeology underlying the couples' shared notoriety, while her husband focused on publishing and public advocacy for the nascent field of paleoanthropology through his non-profit, the LSB Leakey Foundation, and support of the three female primatologists later known as the Trimates: Biruté Galdikas (1946–2006), Dian Fossey (1932–1985), and Jane Goodall (1934–2025). The couple separated permanently in 1968. Her husband relocated to Nairobe, while she remained at Olduvai and nearby sites in Tanzania, and from then on publicly took credit for her work. Four years after her husband's death, she published her team's discovery of the Laetoli footprints to international acclaim. It is today considered one of the most important finds in the history of paleoanthropology, pushing back the origin of human bipedalism into the Pliocene. In 1962, she was awarded the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographic Society. At the 1978 Nobel Symposium in Karlskoga, she was awarded the Great Linnaeus Medal in Gold of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, by King Carl XVI Gustav. In 2013, she was the subject of the Google doodle on the 100th anniversary of her birth.

Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0