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.
THE SEDIMENTS OF TIME
by Meave Leakey
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November 2020
(chez MacKenzie Wolf – voir catalogue)
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
“An exciting and richly informative scientist’s autobiography…This major work of scientific dedication and original insight illuminates both our distant past and our current, serious, human-caused planetary challenges.” —Booklist starred review
Meave Leakey currently coheads the significant field efforts in northern Kenya, started nearly a century ago by Louis and Mary Leakey, seeking the fossil records to the roots of humankind. She has worked at the National Museums of Kenya since 1969, including the head of the paleontology department, and is research professor at Stony Brook University, New York. She is the recipient of several honorary degrees, has been elected an honorary fellow of the Geological Society of London, inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, was a National Geographic Explorer in Residence, served as a fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, and received the National Geographic Society Hubbard Medal, among many other accolades and achievements. She is also an author of numerous groundbreaking scientific publications in prestigious journals and of several monographs documenting her research.
Samira Leakey obtained a BA in politics with First-Class Honours from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a master’s in public administration from Princeton University. Samira worked at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and now lives in Nairobi with her daughter.
We are lonelier than ever. The average American hasn’t made a new friend in the last five years. Research has shown that people with close friends are happier, healthier, and live longer than people who lack strong social bonds. But why— when we are seemingly more connected than ever before—can it feel so difficult to keep those bonds alive and well? Why do we spend only four percent of our time with friends? In this warm, inspiring guide, Adam « Smiley » Poswolsky proposes a new solution for the mounting pressures of modern life: focus on your friendships. Smiley offers practical habits and playful reminders on how to create meaningful connections, make new friends, and deepen relationships. He’ll help you develop a healthier relationship with technology, but he’ll also encourage you to prioritize real-world experiences, send snail mail, and engage in self-reflective exercises.
In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—”the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology”—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than “Lucy,” then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today’s chimpanzee—and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy. FOSSIL MEN is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world’s greatest fossil hunters, Tim White—an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn’t bother going home at night to devote more hours to science
In illness, Bauer provides a surprising new lens through which to consider all of human history—she argues that bodily sickness and our conception of it has shaped our culture, our philosophies, and our religions, and has directly and indirectly affected how we view others, how we view ourselves, and how we fashion our world. She argues that sickness is the great mirror that reflects back our most urgent and eternal questions: Why does calamity descend without warning? How can we explain it? And how do we fight back? Told in a propulsive narrative style that brings sweeping history to life through intimate individual stories—the feverish Mesopotamian sufferer; the plague victim who dies alone, the last in his village; the seventeenth-century teenager racked by smallpox; the Congolese grandmother watching her family die of Ebola—Bauer takes readers on a journey from humans’ earliest days when sickness was an unsolvable mystery, evidence that humans were powerless to the unseen forces of gods, to more modern times and the birth of germ theory, when secularism grew alongside our fear of contamination. A multidisciplinary human history like no other, BONES, BLOOD, BREATH is a big think book that tells a large-scale, vivid, chronological story, stretching around the world from ancient times until the present—it will change the way we understand who we are.