Leakey, Mary Douglas definition of Leakey, Mary Douglas in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Leakey, Mary Douglas, 1913–96, British archaeologist, b. London as Mary Douglas Nicol; wife of Louis Leakey Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett (băz`ət, lē`kē), 1903–72, British archaeologist and anthropologist of E Africa, b.
..... Click the link for more information. and mother of Richard Leakey Leakey, Richard Erskine Frere (frĭr), 1944–, Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and government official.
..... Click the link for more information. . She had little formal education, but a fascination with archaeology led to her supervising her first dig in England in 1934. Several years after she met Louis Leakey in England she began work with him at Olduvai Gorge Olduvai Gorge (ōl`dəwā', –vā'), a feature of the E African Rift Valley in Tanzania.
..... Click the link for more information. (now in Tanzania). In Africa she made some of anthropology's most significant finds. In 1948 she discovered a 20-million-year-old skull of Proconsul africanus (see Proconsul Proconsul, extinct group of apes, now considered a subgroup of Dryopithecus. Proconsul fossils have been discovered in E Africa. It is a probable ancestor of the chimpanzee and lived from 12 to 25 million years ago.
..... Click the link for more information. ); in 1959 she discovered a hominid fossil (Zinjanthropus) believed to be 1,750,000 years old. Her work Excavations in Beds I and II, 1960–63 (1971, Vol. III of Olduvai Gorge, 1951–1961, 6 vol., 1965–94) contains a detailed analysis of the thousands of 2-million-year-old stone tools from that site. In 1978 she supervised excavations at Laetoli, Tanzania, where a set of footprints preserved in hardened volcanic ash were uncovered. These indicate a 3.6-million-year-old hominid—presumablyAustralopithecus) Australopithecus (ôstrā'lōpĭth`əkəs, –pəthē`kəs)
..... Click the link for more information. —walked upright. Mary Leakey employed her artistic talents in her book Africa's Vanishing Art: The Rock Paintings of Tanzania (1983).

Bibliography

See her autobiography, Disclosing the Past (1984), and her account of her investigations, Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man (1979); see also V. Morell, Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings (1995).