ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 10, 1996 TAG: 9612100106
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NAIROBI, KENYA
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Associated Press
IN 1978 Mary Leakey made her most important discovery: 3.5-million-year-old footprints.
Archaeologist and anthropologist Mary Leakey, whose driving curiosity about prehistoric humans led her and her husband to momentous discoveries about man's origins, died Monday. She was 83.
Louis and Mary Leakey found fossils in Tanzania and Kenya that indicated man's evolution began in East Africa 2 million years ago, far earlier than was believed at the time of the discovery.
Three months before her death, Mary Leakey said it was impossible for scientists ever to pinpoint exactly when prehistoric man became fully human. But then, the precise relationship between man and his ancestors was not her passion; instead, she was fascinated by early man's behavior.
``We shall probably never know where humans began and where hominids left off,'' she said at her home near the easternmost edge of the Great Rift Valley.
Because scientists can never prove a particular scenario of human evolution, Leakey said, ``All these trees of life with their branches of our ancestors, that's a lot of nonsense.''
Leakey filled her life with fossils and bones, making delicate drawings of prehistoric tools. She had three sons with Louis Leakey, her partner in the great search for the origins of man that took them through much of East Africa.
She had no formal education in archaeology or paleontology, but Leakey's eye and passion guided her to many significant finds.
Working with her husband in Kenya in 1947, Leakey discovered the skull of Proconsul africanus, an ape-like ancestor of both apes and prehistoric man that lived about 25 million years ago. In 1959, at Olduvai Gorge, she discovered the skull of an early hominid - or pre-man human - that Louis dubbed ``Zinjanthropus.''
In 1978, six years after her husband's death and at age 65, she made her most important discovery: footprints frozen for 3.5 million years in volcanic mud, which demonstrated that early hominids walked upright much earlier than previously thought.
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Leakeyby CNB