Mary Leakey

Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetoli footprints, and at the Laetoli site she discovered hominin fossils that were more than 3.75 million years old.

6 February 1913

Born on the same birth day (6 February): Alison Haislip • Andrey Zvyagintsev • C. Lloyd Morgan • Eva Wacanno • Fei Yu • Gyula Lóránt • Joseph Auguste Émile Vaudremer • Jun Kondō • Kate McGarrigle • Leslie Crowther • Masaharu Fukuyama • Nikolay Zelinsky • Patrick Russell (herpetologist) • Ric Charlesworth • S. Sreesanth • Tobias Eisenbauer • Tom Brokaw • Vasily Safonov • Willie Tee

Born in the same month (February 1913): Betty Field • Danai Stratigopoulou • Erich Eliskases • Frank Tashlin • Gert Fröbe • Irwin Shaw • James Pike • Jim Backus • Jimmy Hoffa • Kazimierz Sabbat • Khalid of Saudi Arabia • Mel Allen • Paul Ricœur • Pedro Gastão of Orléans-Braganza • Poul Reichhardt • Rosa Parks • Tommy Henrich • Woody Hayes