English archaeologist and paleontologist whose crucial discoveries include Proconsul africanus, a 1.7 million-year-old dryopithecine (primitive ape) in 1948, at Rusinga Island, in Lake Victoria; then the 1.75 million-year-old hominid Zinjanthropus (later reclassified as Australopithecus boisei) at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, in 1959; and Homo habilis, a new species contemporary with, but more advanced than, Zinjanthropus in 1960-1963. Also remarkable was her excavation in 1976 at Laetoli, Tanzania, of fossilized hominid footprints, preserved in volcanic ash, which proved that our ancestors already walked upright 3.6 million years ago.

I've found him - found our man! [on her 1959 discovery in Tanzania of a 1.8-million-year-old hominid skull, one of the earliest traces of human origin]