Mary Leakey: The Expelled Rebel Who Rewrote Human Evolution

Told by Oxford that applying would be a waste of time, expelled twice (once for blowing up a chemistry lab), this unteachable girl grew up to brush volcanic ash from 3.6-million-year-old footprints of our earliest ancestors, and eventually received an honorary doctorate from that same Oxford.This episode follows paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey from a nomadic French childhood to scientific legend in East Africa. It's the story of a fiercely independent mind who smoked cigars, let wild hyraxes eat at her dinner table, and saw what formally trained men were taught to overlook.How sorting a French archaeologist's discard pile at age 12 trained her eye for what academics missedHer scandalous romance with married Louis Leakey that ruined his Cambridge career and exiled them to KenyaThe 1959 morning she alone discovered the Zinjanthropus skull while Louis lay ill in campThe Laetoli footprint trail and how potassium-argon dating bracketed it to 3.6 million years agoHer partnership with Kenyan fossil finder Kamoya Kimeu and her honors, including 15 new species and an Oxford doctorate