The Sediments Of Time By Meave Leakey — Review

Prominent paleoanthropologist, Meave Leakey, provides an excellent overview of how we know what we know about human evolution as revealed by her research career and life in Kenya

Meave Leakey is a real-life Indiana Jones. Her life has been filled with adventure, struggle, and discovery after amazing discovery that are detailed in her riveting autobiography, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search For The Past (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020: Amazon US / Amazon UK).

The author’s story begins with her birth during the middle of the London Blitz in 1942, then quickly moves on to her unconventional youth and to her dream to become a marine biologist, an unusual ambition for a woman in the early 1960s. Only after being repeatedly denied a place on a research vessel because these ships lacked facilities for female scientists (!!) did she begin looking around for other scientific opportunities. As luck would have it, she was invited to interview with Louis Leakey to care for his colony of live monkeys in Kenya. Soon after arriving on site, she entered another male-dominated scientific field when she began digging hominid fossils alongside Louis and Mary Leakey, contributing to the work they began almost 100 years ago.

This book, which her second daughter Samira helped write, includes brief details about Meave’s life with husband, Richard, such as when he lost both legs in a plane crash that probably resulted from sabotage, and when she donated one of her kidneys to him after his failed, but the majority of the book focuses on Meave’s long and celebrated career as she worked to better understand our own evolutionary history. It uses good old fashioned storytelling to combine science and field work to reveal the intellectual excitement of discovery and the huge strides made in our knowledge of human origins and evolution. Each new fossil that’s unearthed adds to our growing body of knowledge, and each new advance in dating techniques and molecular biology refines that knowledge. Further, the author contextualized these discoveries within the local ecology and the landscape that was responding to the changing climate.

In my opinion, one of the most interesting findings is that modern-day people are not the pinnacle of a straightforward evolutionary trajectory extending from ancient ape-like creatures to modern humans, but instead, the fossil evidence increasingly shows that we are the product of a messy affair between a number of hominid species that lived alongside each other in the Turkana Basin and elsewhere.

I was disappointed by the illustrations, which were few and very far between. I especially wanted to see the geology and the landscape of Lothagam, which the author describes as “stunning”, and also because she claimed that her work in this region was important for establishing her credibility as an competent fossil hunter both with her field crews and with funding sources. Unfortunately, not even a Google search provided much to look at.

I think that the book and its readers would have benefitted greatly from a timeline showing when the first hominids began to stand upright and to develop big brains, including the not-so-distant past when humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans coexisted, up to the present time. Additionally, because the author frequently mentions the usefulness of pig and elephant teeth for estimating the ages other fossils unearthed in the same sedimentary layers, a timeline or diagram illustrating the evolutionary progression of pig and elephant dentition and their locations in the various sediment layers would also have been helpful to familiarize readers with the time intervals being investigated.

Despite the scarcity of useful illustrations and diagrams, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in evolution (especially human evolution), or palaeontology, who is interested in what it’s like to do field work in Kenya, or who wants to know how one determined female scientist managed to accomplish so much at a time when most of the world’s women were trapped in a kitchen.