Mary Leakey (along with her husband Louis, who died in 1972 AD) continued what Darwin had started: searching for the origin of the human species that we know today. Born Mary Douglas Nicol in February 1913 in London, she was the only daughter of a landscape artist who seemingly inherited her father’s talent at sketching. While living in the Dordogne region of France riddled with prehistoric cave settlements, she became interested in Paleolithic archaeology. When her father died in 1926, mother and daughter returned to England where Mary was enrolled in convent schools in Kensington and Wimbledon … but the independent young miss was expelled … twice.

Given her academic record, university admission was impossible, but Mary – though unregistered – attended lectures in geology and archaeology at University College and at the London Museum. In 1930 she applied for work as a sketch artist at a number of excavations, including that at Hembury, a Neolithic site where she made illustrations of tools. Her efforts there drew the attention of various publishers, and in 1934 she was introduced to Louis Leakey as an artist for his book 'Adam’s Ancestors.' Mary married him in 1936.

Shortly after wedding, the couple moved to East Africa when Louis was funded for an excavation project at the Olduvai Gorge. Over the following decades they would make several notable discoveries – the 18 million year-old Proconsul Africanus in 1948, the two million year-old Australopithecus Boisei in 1959, and the next year found the fossils of Homo habilis (the “missing link”) and evidence of tool making. When Louis died, Mary Leakey continued her digging and sketching, discovering another important clue to mankind’s ancestry by finding a trail of footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania in 1979. She died in December 1996.