Google Doogle and world celebrated the life and legacy of Mary Leaky on what would have been her 100th birthday on February 6. Leaky was a leading paleoanthropologist from Great Britain who's renowned for her groundbreaking discoveries in Africa that transformed the study of human evolution.
Leaky was born as Mary Douglas Nicol in London in 1913. Though she didn't excel in grade school, she found her calling in the field of archeology later in life and audited university classes in archaeology and geology.
Before she met Louis Leaky in 1933, whom she married in 1937, Leaky worked as an illustrator at the Hembury Dig in Devon, England, where she gained recognition for her depictions of Stone Age artifacts. Louis hired her to illustrate his findings in 1933, however the two fell in love and ended up doing excavations together.
Leaky is most noted for her discovery of a Proconsul skull in Africa that was proven to be a prehistoric ape ancestor, a Australopithecine Bosei skull that dated back to an unprecedented 1.75 million years, and fossil footprints of prehistoric hominids.
Despite her legacy, many people argue that Mary Leakey was under-appreciated and undervalued as a woman in a "man's field". In addition, her field partner and husband, Louis Leakey, would often present her findings in public and seemly and take the credit. However, Virginia Morell, the author of "Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Human Beginnings" says that she preferred to avoid the spotlight and did not feel threatened by her husband or male counterparts.
Leaky died in 1996.
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