Mary Leakey

Hello! My name is Mary Leakey. I'd like to tell you my story, which is really the story of all of us—the story of where humans came from. I was born in London, England, on February 6th, 1913. My father was a painter, and because of his work, we traveled a lot. When I was a little girl, he took me to see ancient caves in France where people had painted on the walls thousands of years ago. I was fascinated! I loved history and drawing so much that I started my own collection of interesting stones and tools I found on the ground. I knew, even then, that I wanted to spend my life digging up the past.

As I grew up, my passion for the past turned into the study of archaeology—the science of learning about ancient people. In 1933, I met a man named Louis Leakey, who shared my excitement for finding clues about early humans. We fell in love and got married. Louis believed that the story of humanity began in Africa, a new idea at the time. So, in 1935, we moved there together to search for evidence. We spent much of our time in a place called Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. It was a hot, dusty, and difficult place to work, but we were sure that important secrets were buried there, just waiting to be found.

For years, we searched under the hot African sun. It took a lot of patience. Sometimes we would dig all day and find nothing but rocks and dirt. But I never gave up on our mission. Then, in 1948, while working on an island in Kenya, I made my first major discovery! I found the fossilized skull of an ancient ape called Proconsul africanus. It was over 18 million years old! Finding this skull was so exciting because it was a piece of the puzzle of how apes, and eventually humans, evolved. It helped prove that Africa was the right place to be looking for the beginnings of our story.

My most famous discovery came on a regular day in Olduvai Gorge on July 17th, 1959. Louis was feeling sick, so I went out to search with my two dogs. Suddenly, I saw a piece of bone sticking out of the ground. It didn't look like an animal bone. I started to carefully brush away the dirt, and I realized it was part of a skull—a hominin skull! Hominins are ancient relatives of modern humans. We spent the next few weeks carefully digging it out of the rock. We nicknamed it 'Zinj' and 'Dear Boy.' The skull belonged to a new species we called Paranthropus boisei, and we learned it was 1.75 million years old. This discovery was huge news around the world. It helped prove that humanity was much, much older than people thought, and that our story truly began in Africa.

You might think finding a skull would be my most amazing discovery, but another one was just as incredible. In 1978, my team and I were working in a place called Laetoli, also in Tanzania. We found something that made me gasp: footprints! But these weren't ordinary footprints. They had been preserved in volcanic ash that had hardened into rock millions of years ago. We uncovered a whole trail of them, left by three ancient hominins who had walked there about 3.6 million years ago. Looking at them, you could almost imagine the family walking together. These footprints proved that our ancestors walked upright, on two legs, long before they had big brains or made complicated tools.

I spent my entire life carefully brushing away the dust of time to find the story of our earliest ancestors. Each fossil and footprint was a word in a long story, and I helped put the sentences together. I lived to be 83 years old, working in Africa for most of my life. My discoveries, especially the 'Zinj' skull and the Laetoli footprints, changed the way we see ourselves. They remind us that the story of humanity is written in the very earth beneath our feet, waiting for the next curious person to find it.