<kwylie@pilot.msu.edu>


I just wanted to say a few words as an "Africanist" about
Mary Leakey, who died yesterday at 83.  Who can forget the
photos of her famous (flamboyant) husband in _National
Geog._ holding in his huge fists the upper half of the skull
(this was in 1959, my junior year in college) of "Nutcracker
Man," later classified and re-classified as
*Australopithecus bosei*, over a million and a half years
old.  All that publicicity, and in the background of each of
the marvelous photo series in that magazine, and many
others, was Mary, quiet, so different from her
publicity-craving husband.

    He went on to fame, of course, particularly after she
found the skull of *Homo habilis* (she had found the above
fossil too; in fact she found most of the important ones.),
proving a more or less "direct" or at least theoreticaly
"tracible" evolutionary sequence from the australopithicines
to the homonid line.  Her discovery of the incredible,
staggering, "tracks"  at Laetoli in 1978 (or was it in '76),
a few years after Louis's death in 1972, established her
name, and a growing reputation, not only because she
personified "Leakey's Luck" (which she once explained with
the comment, "Our luck came because of hundreds, thousands
of hours of searching and digging and knowing where to
look"), but also because she had an incredibly keen sense of
the convergences within the science of paleontology, etc.
She had no degree at all.  In the end, when the Laetoli
tracks began to get some acceptance (fully "human" type
prints made 3.7 million years ago in rain-wet fresh volcanic
ash, that hardened into stone soon after and then was
covered over the millennia by other deposits), her
explanation "A male walking with a female, and next to the
female, perhaps holding her hand, a smaller human, obviously
a child.  While walking the woman paused, turning to her
left, maybe a predator was nearby, or the volcano was
erupting.  This motion, so intensely human, transcends
time"; she added, "A remote ancestor, just like you or I,
experienced a moment of doubt."

    What a story!  She preferred the expedition tent to the
cottage and preferred the bush of Olduvai, (and a score of
other sites in Tanzania and Kenya) to the city.  She hated
the whirlwhind tours (Louis loved them), and from the moment
she arrived in Kenya as Leakey's bride (his second wife, in
fact, she rarely left Africa, and hated doing so.  She, like
all her family, was fluent in Swahili and conversant in
other languages, and never entered into the escapism of the
old settler elite.

    Her son, Richard, went on to equal fame, perhaps more
even than his celebrated parents, and for a time he eclipsed
her accomplishments.  I never met her, though I heard
Richard deliver a lecture at MSU in 1987, I think, maybe
'88, nor any of the clan, not even in my trips to Kenya,
when I made a point of meeting the people in the
environmental field.  Yet this news of her death really has
affected me.

    I keep thinking why is it in our world we do not
immediately have a dozen screenplays or filmscripts offered
on the life of women like this?  There is romance, hard
work, disease, violence (both of the elder Leakey's stayed
through the worst of Mau Mau), set-backs, children,
recognition, fame, money, the corruption of the latter, and
a triumphant old age, by most accounts (so much of her work
came to fruition after she was well past 60)--every
element, you would think!

But our heroes today are bogus concoctions from romantic
novels, faked up spouses or superhero clones, or young
mothers threatened in their homes by potential kidnappers or
rapists, etc, or perhaps nuns who give their all to
condemned murderers.  Maybe the latter represent the genuine
article, but I for one do not want juiced up superromantic
claptrap.  But can anyone read about Mary Leakey and not
ponder the mystery of what makes humans rise above the
common mud?

Ken

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