Mary Leakey

Hello! My name is Mary Leakey. Ever since I was a little girl, I loved adventures and looking for treasures from the past. I was born in London, England, on February 6th, 1913. My father was an artist, so our family traveled to many interesting places. When I was just a girl, he took me to France to see amazing paintings inside a cave. People had drawn them thousands of years ago! Seeing those ancient pictures made me say, 'I want to be an archaeologist!'. An archaeologist is like a detective who studies the very distant past. I also loved to draw, and I would make sketches of all the interesting old tools and artifacts I found.

When I grew up, I met a man named Louis Leakey who was an archaeologist, just like me! We both dreamed of finding clues about the very first humans. In 1936, we got married and decided to work together. Our biggest adventure took us all the way to Africa. We spent many years working in countries like Kenya and Tanzania. One of our favorite places was called Olduvai Gorge. It was a huge, dusty canyon with layers of rock that were like pages in a history book. We would carefully dig and brush away the dirt, hoping to find fossils. Fossils are the parts of ancient animals and people that have turned to stone over a very long time.

Working in Africa was hard, but it was also so exciting! One of my first big finds happened in 1948, when I discovered the skull of an ancient ape called Proconsul. It was the very first one ever found! Then, one day in 1959, I saw a piece of a skull sticking out of the dirt at Olduvai Gorge. It turned out to be a very, very old human relative. We gave him the nickname 'Zinj.' This was an amazing discovery because it helped prove that the story of humans began right there in Africa. But my most famous discovery came later, in 1978. My team and I found footprints! They weren't regular footprints you leave in the sand. They were fossils, left in wet volcanic ash more than three million years ago. These footprints showed that our ancient relatives walked on two feet, just like we do.

I spent my whole life digging in the dirt, searching for clues about where we all came from. Every fossil, every tool, and every footprint I found was like a piece of a giant puzzle. I lived to be 83 years old, and my work as a 'fossil hunter' was my greatest joy. The discoveries I made helped show the world that the amazing story of humankind started in Africa, millions of years ago. I hope my story reminds you to always stay curious and never stop exploring the world around you.