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Title details for The Sediments of Time by Meave Leakey - Available

The Sediments of Time

My Lifelong Search for the Past

by Meave Leakey
Samira Leakey
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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"Extraordinary . . . This inspirational autobiography stands among the finest scientist memoirs."
—New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
Meave Leakey's thrilling, high-stakes memoir—written with her daughter Samira—encapsulates her distinguished life and career on the front lines of the hunt for our human origins, a quest made all the more notable by her stature as a woman in a highly competitive, male-dominated field.
In The Sediments of Time, preeminent paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey brings us along on her remarkable journey to reveal the diversity of our early pre-human ancestors and how past climate change drove their evolution. She offers a fresh account of our past, as recent breakthroughs have allowed new analysis of her team's fossil findings and vastly expanded our understanding of our ancestors.

Meave's own personal story is replete with drama, from thrilling discoveries on the shores of Lake Turkana to run-ins with armed herders and every manner of wildlife, to raising her children and supporting her renowned paleoanthropologist husband Richard Leakey's ambitions amidst social and political strife in Kenya. When Richard needs a kidney, Meave provides him with hers, and when he asks her to assume the reins of their field expeditions after he loses both legs in a plane crash, the result of likely sabotage, Meave steps in.

The Sediments of Time is the summation of a lifetime of Meave Leakey's efforts; it is a compelling picture of our human origins and climate change, as well as a high-stakes story of ambition, struggle, and hope.
"A fascinating glimpse into our origins. Meave Leakey is a great storyteller, and she presents new information about the far off time when we emerged from our ape-like ancestors to start the long journey that has led to our becoming the dominant species on Earth. That story, woven into her own journey of research and discovery, gives us a book that is informative and captivating, one that you will not forget."
—Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 10, 2020

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780358308942
      • File size: 420211 KB
      • Duration: 14:35:26

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      With crisp British enunciation, narrator Susan Myers portrays the preeminent paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey. Leakey, wife of Richard Leakey, daughter-in-law of Mary and Lewis Leakey, who discovered the early human ancestor called Lucy, describes her digs and finds on the shores of Lake Turkana in northwest Kenya. Throughout this history of science and discovery, Leakey describes her search to learn why hominids shifted from walking on four feet to two. Through Myers's engaging narration, listeners learn about prehistoric environmental changes that affected plants and animals, especially hominids of all species and genera. Myers's skilled and graceful narration of Leakey's words describes the dating of fossils, ash, and sediment layers and the evolution of teeth, jaws, and skulls between seven and two million years ago. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 20, 2020
      Paleoanthropologist Leakey’s disappointing debut memoir isn’t nearly as illuminating about her storied career as one might hope. Writing with the aid of her daughter Samira, Leakey shares bits of her life, mentioning almost in passing the births of her two daughters and her marriage to a fellow paleoanthropologist, Richard Leakey, but her main focus is on the discoveries she and her team made about the fossil record of early humans and pre-humans. These include the 1999 discovery of a skull that she identified as coming from a previously unknown species of hominin: Kenyanthropus platyops, or “flat-faced man from Kenya.” The fossils drive her story to such an extent that the chronology of her career is difficult to follow. Leakey also spends significant time providing readers with rudimentary scientific grounding largely tangential to her story, discussing, in an accessible, if rather pedestrian, manner topics such as how climate works, the ability that some nonhuman primates have to use language, and the methodology used to acquire and age Antarctic ice cores. Leakey’s fascinating life and work deserve more attention than they received in this volume. Agent: Gillian MacKenzie, MacKenzie Wolf.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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