THE SEDIMENTS OF TIME

Another member of human anthropology’s “First Family” carries on the high standards of her predecessors.

Patriarch Louis Leakey (1903-1972) demonstrated, after a considerable struggle, that humans evolved in Africa and made pioneering discoveries in Kenya along with his wife, Mary, who added her own. Louis’ son, Richard, carried on the family tradition. Meave is Richard’s wife, and readers need not fear that absence of founder DNA diluted the Leakey genius, because it’s clear from this memoir that baby Meave hit the ground running. Daughter of a surgeon in rural Britain, before age 10, she was cultivating and selling eggs, geese, and lambs. As a teenager, she traveled the world, attended a nearly all-male technical school, and fell in love with the ocean during holidays at the beach. After obtaining a degree in marine biology, she discovered that no jobs existed because research ships in the 1960s could not “accommodate” women. Phoning to answer an ad for a research position in Africa, she found herself speaking to Louis Leakey, who hired her after determining that she would work for little money under difficult conditions and possessed the ability to repair a car. She started at a research center in Nairobi, where she cared for and dissected monkeys to obtain her doctorate and met Richard Leakey. She joined him in his field research and proved herself as hardy, obsessive, observant, opinionated, and—essential in searching for human remains—as lucky as her relations. Aided by daughter Samira, who lives with her family in Kenya, Maeve describes a life that many readers will envy. Her discoveries, often after numbingly tedious work in a brutal climate, added new species to our family tree, teased out more information about existing ancestors, and increased our knowledge of how evolution, geology, and climate change gave rise to modern humans. She is not shy about explaining all this, although some details will overwhelm general readers.

An illuminating memoir of an impressive scientist.