Mary Leakey The Sun is the size of a human foot (Heraclitus) In 1871, Charles Darwin wrote the following premonitory phrase: it is very likely that our first parents lived on the African continent . Today, we know that the lowlands of the Afar region, in the wilderness of East Africa, were our cradle. We still have the sulphur atoms from the volcanoes of the Rift and the water molecules from the Blue Nile in our bodies. The first signs of this African past were revealed by a palaeoanthropologist named Mary Leakey, a century after the publication of On the Origin of Species . Mary Leakey was born in London on 6th February 1913, into a nomadic and cosmopolitan family. Her father was a wellknown watercolour painter who continually travelled the world in search of landscapes. Mary herself was eleven years old when she visited the famous Cro-Magnon cave, which aroused in the girl a great interest in anthropology and prehistory. After her father died in 1926, Mary returned to London to begin a traditional schooling that, inevitably, was a resounding failure. This woman, who in her old age had accumulated nine honoris causa doctorates, barely had any academic training; she attended only a few courses in geology and archaeology that allowed her to make her way into the universe of the scientific expeditions of the time. Curiously, Mary’s gifts for drawing, inherited from her father, opened doors for her. It was another woman, Dr. Gertrude Caton, who asked Mary to illustrate one of her works on a fossiliferous area in northern Egypt. And so it was that young Mary’s imagination was finally captured by the indomitable continent of Africa. There she also met her great love, Louis Leakey, the son of some missionaries established in Kenya who already stood out for his palaeontological work. They were married in 1936, forming a couple that wrote the most brilliant pages of science on human evolution. On the morning of 17th July 1959, in Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania), Mary identified the magnificent remains of a fossil human among the sediments. This boy, very skilled in making tools, was a whopping 1.75 million years old. Homo habilis was revealed to the world amidst great fanfare, setting in motion a traditional allocation of gender roles. While Mary remained in charge of the site, working steadily, discreetly and rigorously, Louis dedicated himself to travelling the world as the scientific star of the moment. The Leakeys managed to seduce the National Geographic Society, which became a patron of the African excavations. In 1972, after the death of Louis, Mary was definitively in charge of the investigation. This phase was remarkable for its enormous scientific production and its interest in training local experts, and for laying the foundations of a fieldwork methodology that subsequent generations have followed. Mary was bordering on old age (1978) when the greatest discovery of her career arrived: the first human footsteps, the trail of the curious monkey that got down from the trees to walk upright on the Earth. The Laetoli footprints were imprinted on the volcanic ash of Ngorongoro (Tanzania). Australopithecus afarensis , our remote ancestor, made Mary Leakey a universal legend The ashes of Mary Leakey sleep strewn over the fiery lands of Olduvai, to the lullaby of our ancestors. 24
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