Mary Leakey :: essays research papers

Though technically defined as an archaeologist, Mary chose to follow a route of interesting enquiry relating to physical anthropology. She is known mostly for the excavation of a two million-year-old fossilized human skull in 1959. She has also worked to help the world understand that the developing of humans follows a principle rather than a theory.The name Leakey is similar in most peoples minds with the successive dramatic discoveries of fossilized hominid clappers and mark artifacts that have, over the years, pushed the origins of true man further and further back end in prehistory. Less flamboyant than her husband, Louis S. B. Leakey, or her son Richard Leakey, Mary Leakey was the " unnamed hero, of the clan for years, even though she was, in fact, responsible for many of the prominent Leakey finds, including the nearly masterful skull of Zinjanthropus, which was at first thought to be the absent human evolutionary link. Mrs. Leakey finally received a measure of lo ng-overdue humans recognition with her discovery, in 1978, of 3.5-million-year-old fossilized hominid footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania, proving beyond a doubt that the australopithecines had walked upright. On July 17, 1959 Mary Leakey made her second study discovery. Accompanied only by her two Dalmatians, Mary Leakey set take away to investigate the oldest layer at the site. As she surveyed the exposure with her practiced eye, a scrap of bone protruding from the ground caught her attention. Gently brushing by some of the deposit, she saw two large hominid odontiasis in place in an upper jaw. Mrs. Leakey raced back to camp shouting, "Ive got him Ive got him" Using camels-hair brushes and alveolar consonant picks, the Leakeys gingerly uncovered a full palate and set of teeth by sifting through tons of eroded scree, they eventually name about 400 bone fragments, which when pieced together formed an almost complete hominid skull, later dated at 1.75 million years, of t he genus Zinjanthropus. Over the neighboring few months, Mary Leakey found other hominid bones and 164 stone tools of twelve different types, including choppers, scrapers, anvils, and hammerstones.As luck would have it, a camera crew for the British television series On Safari arrived on the scene the day after Mary Leakeys momentous find, and thus it was that "Zinj" came to multinational public attention. For the Leakeys, it meant worldwide recognition. Fame brought controversy, too, and it was not long before Louis Leakeys bold averment that "Zinj" was the so-called "missing link" between the primitive ape-men and Homo sapiens was proved to be incorrect.