Today would have been Mary Leakey's 100th birthday. The first time I heard her name was in my Archaeology 101 course at Clark College in Vancouver, WA. Our professor was showing us a video documenting the Leakey Families work in Olduvai Gorge. For those of you who don't know Olduvai Gorge is a paleoanthropologists dream land. The Olduvai Gorge is located in Eastern Africa and has become known for its immense amount of information regarding our earliest ancestors.
It was there, in 1972, that the Leakey's (Mary and her husband, Louis) discovered the 1.75 million year old skeleton of the Homo habilis. Prior to finding the Homo habilis, the Leakey's had been finding stone tools and it was their search for this tool maker that eventually lead them to the skeleton. For curious minds, here are three pictures of Homo habilis and one of Olduvai Gorge that I snagged off of Google images;
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| Photo: Wikipedia via Google Images |
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| Photo: Wikipedia via Google Images |
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| Photo: Wikipedia via Google Images |
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| Photo: Wikipedia via Google Images |
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In 1978, Mary went on to discover the Laetoli footprints, also located in Tanzania, East Africa.
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| Photo: Wikipedia via Google Images |
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The footprints are a significant find because they were a verification that early hominids found in Tanzania had were in fact bi-pedal (standing/walking upright on two legs) sooner than we had originally thought.
Without Mary Leakey and her husband Louis, there is a significant portion of human history that we potentially could have gone without knowing. Their persistence in believing in the Olduvai Gorge as a possible location to find early hominids paid off immensely. Their family continues to contribute to science today. Their son Richard is famous for finding "Lucy" an Australopithecus afarensis, believed to be the missing link between apes and humans, among many other things. If you would like to know more about Mary and her discoveries, check out the following two links. The first is from National Geographic and the second is from the Christian Science Monitor.
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/06/mary-leakeys-100th-birthday/
http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2013/0206/Mary-Leakey-100th-birthday-A-son-on-her-adventuresome-parenting
She is definitely a person worth learning more about.
Rachel B.
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