300th Wonder Woman of the Week: Mary Leakey

Deciding who would be the 300th Wonder Woman of the week was no small task. Over the last seven years of running this blog, I have discussed queens, warriors, social activists, warriors, artists, politicians, musicians, and scientists from all over the world. There were pirate queens of the Caribbean, warrior princesses from Asia, poets from the Middle East, and musicians from the United States. I've written about slaves, prostitutes, outlaws, athletes, and even a couple of women who might be considered mass murderers (I'm looking at you, Olga of Kiev!).

So finding a Wonder Woman who perfectly embodied the significance of all two hundred ninety-nine women who came before her baffled me- until I looked into the past, roughly three million years to be (somewhat) exact. The Wonder Woman this week is one of the most important women in the history of anthropology, but is someone almost unheard of out of the discipline. Mary Leakey is however certainly a woman who perfectly represents the women who came before her though- and not just the Wonder Women on this blog.

Mary Leakey was a biological anthropologist who excavated the earliest bipedal humanoids in East Africa whose work helped revolutionize the way scientists looked at the history of human evolution. Before her work, most European historians believed humans had evolved in or around Europe ('cus racism), but Leakey's work helped illuminate the true African descent of humans and paved the way for a better understanding of early man and woman and their three million years of evolutionary history.

From the 1930's-50's, Mary Leakey worked in East Africa on archaeological sites pertaining to the Neolithic Age (the latter of three periods of homo sapiens' history). During her excavations in modern-day Kenya however, Leakey found pre-homo remains in the form of a skull belonging to the proconsul africanus species (23-14 million years ago and not yet bipedal). One of Mary's most famous finds however was in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania where she and her husband Louis found the remains of homo habilis alongside stone tools. In 1959, the pair discovered another anthropoid in the form of paranthropus boisei [though some biological anthropologists classify this under the australopithecus genus].

Mary left East Africa after her 1959 find, but returned after the death of her husband Louis in 1972. It was on her return excavation that Mary found perhaps the most important find of her career- and by accident. Mary was playing a good old game of dung-throw (where the archaeologists would throw elephant dung like a baseball) when one of her partners found several animal tracks cemented in the volcanic rock ground. Mary decided to investigate the prints and found human[oid] footprints. After further excavation, Mary discovered the footprints belonged to a pre-homo species (likely australopithecus afarensis) and remained as a result of those specimens walking across the cooling surface of a recent volcanic emission. The find was revolutionary because it provided one of the earliest examples of human bipedal movement.

Mary Leakey greatly contributed to the understanding of three million years of human evolution. She personally discovered fifteen species of animals and one genus- predominantly related to the human evolutionary tree. More importantly however, her worked helped disprove the racist ideology of Eurocentric evolutionary science by proving humans derived from East Africa and helped establish the framework for evolutionary archaeology.