MARY NICOL LEAKEY: 1913-1996: FIRST LADY OF FOSSILS

She was an unschooled, 20-year-old part-time illustrator and amateur archaeologist in 1933 when she met the man whose name she would help make synonymous with the study of human origins. Louis Leakey was a famous scientist, 10 years her senior, married with two children, a Cambridge University researcher. They fell in love, created a scandal, got married and moved to Africa. She worked for decades–painstakingly, methodically–in his shadow, but by the time Mary Leakey died last week, at 83, in Nairobi, Kenya, her scientific reputation had surpassed that of her more famous husband. “Louis was always the better publicist,” says her son Richard, a world-class fossil hunter in his own right. “But Mary was the centerpiece of the research.”

And what research it was. Starting in the 1930s, when the prevailing view had the human family rooted in Asia, the Leakeys reversed scientific opinion and placed man’s origins in Africa. But while Louis spun grand–sometimes grandiose–theories, Mary preferred the nitty-gritty of fieldwork. She spent long hours under the broiling African sun unearthing precious fossils and stone tools, then carefully measuring, sketching and cataloging them. “Theories come and go,” she once told Pennsylvania State University anatomist Alan Walker, “but fundamental data always remain the same.”

Many of the couple’s most famous discoveries were hers. One of the earliest occurred in October 1948, when Mary caught the glint of a tooth during an expedition to Lake Victoria’s fossil-rich Rusinga Island. It was part of the jaw and skull fragments of a creature called Proconsul africanus, then widely thought to be a human ancestor (though now considered more closely related to the apes). The discovery made them so “exhilarated and also utterly content with each other,” Mary wrote in her 1984 biography, Disclosing the Past, “that we cast aside care…” She gave birth to their third son, Philip, nine months later.

At Olduvai Gorge, the famous Great Rift Valley site in Tanzania where the Leakeys did much of their digging, Mary worked her fossil-hunting magic again 10 years later. While Louis lay feverish in his tent, she burst in, shouting “I’ve got him! I’ve got him–our man!” The find, consisting of two bulges of brown fossilized molars protruding from a slope, turned out to be the skull of a 1.75 million-year-old human ancestor the Leakeys called Zinjanthropus (“Man from East Africa”). The discovery, notes paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell of the University of California, Berkeley, marked the start of “the truly scientific study of the evolution of man.”

Eventually the Leakey partnership soured. When Louis died in 1972, they had been separated for three years–in part because of his philandering. Returning in 1978 to a site in Tanzania called Laetoli, Mary made what she considered the discovery of a lifetime: the unmistakable footprints of a human ancestor, possibly Australopithecus afarensis, in the region’s 3.6 million-year-old volcanic ash. Not only were these hominids walking upright–rather than on all fours as apes do–but they were doing it much earlier than nearly everyone supposed and without the big brains long considered necessary for bipedalism.

Mary left active fieldwork in 1983 and retired to a five-acre compound near Nairobi with her books and her Dalmatians. “Actually, given a chance, I’d rather be in a tent than in a house,” she told a reporter this summer. In August the unflappable, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking “grande dame of archaeology,” as Virginia Morell called Leakey in her recent book Ancestral Passions, got one last glimpse of her beloved footprints just before they were buried under layers of protective fabric, earth and boulders to preserve them for future generations.

–By Frederic Golden. With reporting by Joseph Ngala/Nairobi