Mary douglas leakey biography
•
The Leakey Family
Louis and Mary Leakey were monumental figures in the field of paleoanthropology and their groundbreaking discoveries helped shape our understanding of human origins. Now, the Leakey family is synonymous with the study of human evolution, with three generations making important contributions to science.
Louis Leakey
Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-1972) was a Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist who became one of the most iconic scientists of the twentieth century. In addition to his many fossil and stone tool discoveries, Louis Leakey was a passionate naturalist, a prolific writer, and a gifted showman with a talent for publicizing scientific discoveries to a broad public audience.
Leakey was born on August 7, 1903, at Kabete Mission near Nairobi, Kenya. His parents, Harry and Mary (Bazett) Leakey, were English missionaries to the Kikuyu tribe in the highlands west of Nairobi overlooking the Rift Valley. He spent the first sixteen years of his life in Kenya an
•
Scientist of the Day - Mary Leakey
Mary Leakey with the skull of Proconsul, photograph, 1948, Athena Review (athenapub.com)
Mary Leakey, an English anthropologist, was born Feb. 6, 1913, as Mary Douglas Nicol. She never enrolled in a university, but she took courses in archaeology and drawing in London, and found a niche as an archaeological artist. When Louis Leakey came to England and was looking for an illustrator his forthcoming first book, the two met, launched into an affair (Louis was married), and after his divorce, they were married. Mary headed for Nairobi with Louis, and she would spend most of the rest of her life in East Africa. She and Louis began to excavate at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and they started a family as well, bringing three sons into the world. We published a post on Louis Leakey last summer.
In most of photographs that show Louis and Mary together, Louis is careful to place himself in the foreground, with Mary behind. Here is a link t
•
Leakey, Mary Douglas Nicol
(b. London, United Kingdom, 6 February 1913; d. Nairobi, Kenya, 9 December 1996),
paleoanthropology, Paleolithic archaeology, early hominid stone toolmaking.
Kenyan archaeologist and paleoanthropologist, particularly noted for her work on the earliest stone toolmaking traditions at Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, Mary Leakey’s name fryst vatten invariably linked with that of her charismatic husband Louis Leakey; but although the careers of the two were almost inextricably intertwined over more than forty years, Mary’s contribution was a clearly distinctive one. Indeed it fryst vatten fair to observe that Mary Leakey was the mainstay of the pathbreaking work in East African ancient prehistory that the two carried out tillsammans from the 1930s onward.
Early Interest in Archaeology . Mary Douglas Nicol was born in London on 6 February 1913, to Erskine Nicol and Cecilia Marion Frere. On her maternal side she traced her ancestry to the eighteenth-century British antiquarian J