Background:
Mary Leakey was born Mary Douglas Nicol on February 6, 1913, in London, England. Nicol family were the expert of the watercolor. They use to make the life colorful with their artistic nature. The family of Mary Leakey’s family use to move from one place to another place. They visited several places like; USA, Italy Egypt. She was the decedant of John ferer. This family strived hard to break the chain of the British colonial. They established numerous slaved free communities. Among these communities three remained in existence; Freretown, Kenya, Freretown, South Africa, and Freretown, India.
Education Credentials:
She was awarded her an honorary doctoral degree in 1951 from Oxford. Family was shifted to Kensington where she could attend the lectures without any registration (in secret) in archeology and its related discipline at University College London and the London Museum, where she studied under Mortimer Wheeler.
Excavations:
• In 1934 she was part of a dig at Swanscombe where she discovered the largest elephant tooth known up to that time in Britain, but needed assistance to identify it.
• The years 1935 to 1959, spent at Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti plains of Northern Tanzania, yielded many stone tools from primitive stone-chopping instruments to multi-purpose hand axes. These finds came from Stone Age cultures dated as far back as 100,000 to two million years ago.
• The Leakeys unearthed a Proconsul africanus skull on Rusinga Island, in October 1948
• After Mary's husband died, she continued her work at Olduvai and Laetoli. It was here, at the Laetoli site, that she discovered Hominin fossils that were allegedly more than 3.75 million-years-old. She also discovered fifteen new species of other animals and one new genus.
• From 1976 to 1981 Leakey and her staff worked to uncover the Laetoli hominid footprint trail which was left in volcanic ashes believed to be 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.
Death:
Mary died on 9 December 1996 at the age of 83, a renowned paleoanthropologist, who had not only conducted significant research of her own, but had been invaluable to the research careers of her husband Louis Leakey and their sons Richard, Philip and Jonathan. She did a lot of work at the very comprehension rational and ethical values.
