This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

Now, it's a very great pleasure indeed and privileged to us to have Dr. Mary Leakey with us this afternoon.

She's not a particularly easy person to persuade to give a public lecture.

For her work keeps her more than fully occupied now at Alderway Gorge.

And anyone who has been there, I think it seems something of the work that she is doing, will appreciate the magnitude.

On today's episode, the second to last in our from the archive series, I'm thrilled to share a never-before-release lecture by Mary Leakey from the Leakey Foundation Archive.

It's about the place she called home, the site of several of her revolutionary discoveries, Olduvai Gorge.

Mary Leakey's been called the Grand Dame of Archaeology. She was an exacting and meticulous scientist

who made some of the most significant archaeological finds in the world. The matriarch of the Leakey

family, she was known to prefer digging in the dirt to presenting in lecture halls.

She was also known for her no-nonsense attitude and her love of Dalmatians and strong tobacco.

Sixty years ago, on July 17, 1959, Mary Leakey discovered a fossil that radically changed the world's understanding of human evolution,

and it marked the beginning of modern paleoanthropology.

It was a discovery that came after nearly 30 years of painstaking work at Olduvigorge in Tanzania,

where she and her husband Louis Le Leakey, searched for fossil evidence

of humanity's African origins.

The day Mary made her discovery, Lewis was sick with the flu, so he stayed in bed at their

camp underneath the thorn trees.

Mary, with her constant companions, her Dalmatians, Sally, and Victoria,

went to see what they could find at a nearby site at Oldavai, known as FLK,

named by Lewis for his first wife, Frida.

...