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 missed
• Her scandalous romance with married Louis Leakey that ruined his Cambridge career and exiled them to Kenya
• The 1959 morning she alone discove ...