Word: leakey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
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...
...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...
...patriarch of the scientific clan was the larger-than-life Louis. Born in Kenya's highlands in 1903, the son of British missionaries, he grew up speaking Kikuyu with his friends and feeling more African than European. While doing research at Cambridge, he precipitated the first of many Leakey scandals. He deserted his first wife and two young children to marry artist and archaeologist Mary Nicol. He was also unable to document fully some of his early fossil claims. Undeterred, he returned to Kenya to vindicate himself...
Envious rivals railed at "Leakey's luck" in finding hominid fossils--yet of course it was not luck at all but rather a combination of energy, optimism, persistence, a superb field team--known among scientists as the "Hominid Gang"--and an intimate knowledge of his native terrain. He and Mary made many significant finds, notably the fossil of the species they named Homo habilis (handy man), the earliest known tool user. Since the death of Louis in 1972, his unwavering position that Africa was the cradle of humanity has been rewarded with universal acceptance...