ARCHAEOLOGIST AND ANTHROPOLOGIST ENGLAND AND AFRICAFor me it was the sheer instinctive joy of collecting, or indeed one could say treasure hunting: it seemed that this whole area abounded in objects of beauty and great intrinsic interest that could be taken from the ground.
—MARY LEAKEY
Mary kneeled down over the ground, patiently and meticulously scanning the surface for fossils. Suddenly, something caught her attention. To most, it would look like just a dirty rock, but to Mary’s trained eyes, it was a piece of human history. Bulging out from the ground was a fossilized bit of bone. Mary carefully brushed away the dirt around it to reveal two teeth and a curving jaw. Eventually, she would unearth more than four hundred pieces of the ancient skull. After the fragments were fitted together, analysis showed that the skull belonged to a pre-human ancestor who lived 1.75 million years ago. Mary’s find proved that humanlike creatures existed much earlier than most scientists previously believed. This revolutionary discovery was just one of many important contributions Mary made to the study of archaeology.
Mary Nicol was born on February 6, 1913, in London, England. Her father was a landscape painter with a true passion for archaeology. He shared this love with Mary when she was still a young girl, taking her with him on expeditions to France, Italy, and Switzerland. Mary learned how to excavate and use other techniques by assisting archaeologists as they uncovered and deciphered Stone Age cave paintings in France.
Mary didn’t go to school like other children, but she learned how to read and draw from her father. Mary was only thirteen years old when her father died. At first her mother tried sending her to convent schools, but Mary wasn’t used to learning in a traditional school environment. After Mary was expelled from two institutions, her mother gave up.
Meanwhile, Mary was learning in her own way by attending lectures at museums and universities. When she was just seventeen, Mary assisted at an archaeological site in southern England, directed by archaeologist Dorothy Liddell. Dorothy showed Mary that women could be successful in archaeology, a traditionally male-dominated field. Encouraged, Mary began sketching high-quality pictures of the tools at the site.
One of Mary’s favorite activities was watching the wildebeest migrate in the Serengeti, and even after she was not working there anymore, she returned once a year for the migration.
One day another archaeologist, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, saw young Mary’s drawings. She was very impressed and asked Mary to draw some ancient tools that had been discovered in Egypt. Gertrude introduced Mary to Louis Leakey, an anthropologist who worked in Africa. Louis was writing a book on his work and asked Mary to illustrate it. Mary joined him in Africa and began working on the illustrations and on the dig site. Working side by side and sharing their mutual passion for archaeology, it wasn’t long before Mary and Louis fell in love. In 1936 they married.
Over the next few years, Mary and Louis worked in various sites in Africa. Among Mary’s finds were a cremation ground, ancient tools, and pottery. She made her first famous discovery in 1948, when she dug up the eighteen-million-year-old skull of a pre-human ancestor.
Mary didn’t like to theorize about how the fossils she discovered fit into the timeline of human evolution. “What I came to do was to dig things up and take them out as well as I could,” she said.17
In 1959 Mary made perhaps the greatest find of her career: the skull of a human predecessor that was 1.75 million years old. Before Mary’s discovery, scientists believed that humanlike creatures had existed for only several hundred thousand years. Mary’s discovery proved them all wrong!
Soon after that, she discovered a set of ancient humanlike footprints that were 3.7 million years old. This indicated that early human ancestors walked upright much earlier than scientists had previously thought.
Mary continued to live in Africa until her death in 1996. Her groundbreaking work opened the door for girls of the future who wanted to grow up to be archaeologists, scientists, and adventurers. Through Mary’s archaeological explorations and expertise, theories about the history of human development were changed forever. She remarked, “What I have done in my life I have done because I wanted to do it and because it interested me. I just happen to be a woman, and I don’t believe it has made much difference.”18