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 Mary Leakey was a British archaeologist and anthropologist. Her greatest discoveries were made while she worked in Olduvai Gorge with her husband Louis Leakey, a famed archeologist.
As a child, Mary's interest in archeology was sparked when her family was staying near the caves of Les Eyzies, France. Elie Peyrony was excavating one of the caves there and she received permission to go through his dump. She started a collection of points, scrapers, and blades from the dump and developed her first system of classification. Her interest in prehistory eventually led her to the University College London where she attended lectures for archaeology and geology. She applied to and worked on a number of excavations to be held in the summer where she also worked as a scientific illustrator.
Mary Leakey served her apprenticeship in archaeology under Dorothy Liddell at Hembury in Devon, England, 1930-1934. She spent the next 24 years at Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti plains of Northern Tanzania. These excavations yielded many stone tools from primitive stone-chopping instruments to multi-purpose hand axes from Stone Age cultures dated as far back as 100,000 to two million years ago. Using these tools, she developed a system for classifying the stone tools.
Together with her husband, Mary Leakey unearthed a Proconsul Africanus skull on Rusinga Island, in October of 1947. This skull was the first skull of a fossil ape ever to be found and to this day only three of these apes are known. Their next discovery, in 1959, was a 1.75 million-year-old Australopithecus boisei skull. They also found a less robust Homo habilis skull and bones of a hand. After reconstructing the hand, it was proven the hand was capable of precise manipulation. Many more remains were found at this site. In 1960 she became director of excavation at Olduvai and subsequently took it over, building her own staff. In 1965, the husband and wife team uncovered a Homo erectus skull dated at one million years old.
After Mary's husband passed on, she continued her work at Olduvai and Laetoli. It was here at the Laetoli site, that she discovered Homo fossils that were more than 3.75 million-years-old. She also discovered fifteen new species and one new genus. From 1976 to 1981 Mary and her staff worked to uncover the Laetoli hominid footprint trail that was left in volcanic ashes some 3.6 million years ago. The years that followed this discovery were filled with research at Olduvai and Laetoli, the follow-up work to discoveries and preparing publications.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Leakey
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/klmno/leakey_mary.html
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