For me, one of the most exciting events during our two weeks in Tanzania was completely unexpected. We’d spent days on the Serengeti Plain to see the Great Migration. Now we were driving to the Ngorogoro Conservation Area. We halted very close to the Olduvai Gorge at a rest area with public toilets. [1] A sign advertising our next destination stood on one side of the parking lot.
On the other side UNESCO had erected a huge plaque. Curious, I went over to read it.
I was standing less than 30 miles from where Mary Leakey discovered the Zinjanthropus skull, which pushed back the known timeline of human evolution to 1.75 million years ago and confirmed Africa as the cradle of humankind. AND! She found the Proconsul skull that connected us to a prehistoric ape ancestor. AND! She found the Laetoli footprints, fossil footprints proving early humans had walked erect far longer than scientists had believed. AND! The UNESCO World Heritage sign firmly gave all the credit to Mary, where it belongs.
I was out of my mind with excitement as I read. For some reason I’d always thought that those paleoanthropological discoveries occurred in Kenya (where the Leakeys had also conducted digs). To be so close to where the incredible artifacts were found, and to see her groundbreaking discoveries properly credited at last, thrilled me beyond words.
Mary Leakey has been called ‘the woman who found our ancestors’. But, for as long as I can remember, her husband Louis got (stole!) all the credit. Louis Leakey was charismatic, showy, and a bit of a charlatan. He was skilled at fundraising and loved being in the limelight of fame. When Mary’s discoveries became famous, he traveled around the US to lecture about ‘his’ finds and speculate about their significance.
Mary quietly went on with her field work. She couldn’t care less about fame and wasn’t a bit intimidated by male colleagues.
For almost a century people have been trying to explain away the lack of credit she received. Sometimes her husband’s theft is described as a collaborative effort. As I was putting together this blog post, I was annoyed when I read an article in an article in The Roanoke Times, that “marriage to Mary Nicol paired Leakey with a first-rate scientist freeing him to work the public relations side of science. … Primarily using Mary’s work, Louis regained his scientific reputation.” [2] In other words, she did the work and he got all the credit.
The Smithsonian Magazine’s profile of Mary is even worse. The author said, “It’s worth remembering that Mary Leakey wasn’t university-educated and got her start as an illustrator on archaeological digs like the one where she first met Louis. And that Louis Leakey was already “a Cambridge University professor with an established reputation for fieldwork in East Africa,” according to Barnes, when he left his pregnant first wife to marry Mary, who was in her early twenties. Mary was talented, but she probably wasn’t sure how to play the game of academia, particularly in a field as fraught with intense differences of interpretation as paleoanthropology, which requires practitioners to form extended arguments off a few remaining physical clues about our ancient ancestors.” [3]
The article is another attempt to explain away her husband’s claim to her incredible discoveries as if really, he was just doing her a big favor. This is utter bullshit.
My questions are: WHY is it worth remembering that Mary Leakey wasn’t university educated? Mary probably wasn’t sure how to play the game?? A more plausable explanation is the well known fact that she didn’t indulge in speculation! Mary believed in using science and research to reach the conclusions.
I didn’t know that Uwe took my photo as I paid my respects before that sign. On that afternoon I felt an intense connection to our common ancestors, going back millions and millions of years. Standing where she had, where my first humanoid ancestors stood, made me dizzy.
It took my breath away and brought me close to tears. Still does, actually.
In honor of Mary Douglas Nicol Leakey, 6 February 1913 – 9 December 1996
NOTES: As if all this wasn’t enough, Mary also created a system to classify the stone tools they found at Olduvai. At the Laetoli site where she discovered the footprints, she also found hominin fossils more than 3.75 million years old. She discovered fifteen new animal species. She was responsible for creating a new genus. And she was the first to write about the Kondoa Irangi Rock Paintings in central Tanzania.
[1] Usually we made bush toilets, where you climb out of the jeep and duck down behind the back of it in the road. [2] The Roanoke Times . [3] https://www.smithsonianmag.
© Jadi Campbell 2026. All photos © Uwe Hartmann. To see more of Uwe’s animal photos and pics from our trips go to viewpics.de.
I am a Best American Essays-nominated writer. My books are Broken In: A Novel in Stories, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, The Trail Back Out, and The Taste of Your Name. Recent awards include F
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