Attenzione: argomenti e ospiti potrebbero variare in qualunque momento, senza alcun preavviso e per ragioni del tutto indipendenti dalla mia volonta' e dai miei desideri...
DAL 13 AL 17 GENNAIO 1997
![]()
Leakey, Mary D(ouglas) Nicol
(1913-1996), British paleoanthropologist. The daughter of a landscape painter, Leakey was
born in England but traveled abroad during much of her childhood. She became committed to
anthropology at the age of 11 on viewing the famed Cro-Magnon cave in southern France. She
later took courses in anthropology and geology at University College, London, and became
an expert in stone tools. She participated in excavations in England and in 1931 led a
study of the Clactonian culture in Essex. She then joined the Anglo-Kenyan
paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey's expeditions in Africa and married him in 1936. At the
Olduvai Gorge in 1959, Mary Leakey found the 1,750,000-year-old skull of Zinjanthropus
(later reclassified Australopithecus boisei), which first showed the great antiquity of
hominids in Africa. At Laetoli, Tanzania, she discovered the 3,750,000-year-old jaws and
teeth of a Homo species (1975) and the 3,600,000-year-old fossilized footprints of a
bipedal hominid (1979). Her autobiography is Disclosing the Past (1984).
"Leakey, Mary D(ouglas) Nicol" Microsoft(R) Encarta. Copyright(c) 1995 Microsoft Corporation.