The Sediments of Time - by Meave Leakey & Samira Leakey (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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 prehuman 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 personal story is replete with drama, from thrilling discoveries on the shores of Lake Turkana--including the 3.5-million-year-old skull of the flat-faced man from Kenya, representing an important new branch of the human family--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, 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 apelike 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

Review Quotes

A New York Times Editors' Choice One of A Mighty Girl's 2020 Books of the Year "In a field of celebrity scientists, nobody shines brighter than Meave Leakey. She was once the scion, and is now matriarch, of the Leakey dynasty, three generations of paleoanthropological royalty...[She] tells her extraordinary life story in The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past. Co-written with her youngest daughter, Samira, this inspirational autobiography stands among the finest scientist memoirs." --New York Times Book Review "An excellent overview of how we know what we know about human evolution . . . 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." --Forbes "The Sediments of Time is 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 Review *starred* "Attentive readers of Meave Leakey's masterful memoir, The Sediments of Time, will learn a few details about her personal life....But the main and most illuminating parts of [the book] are about the tedious, painstaking years spent hunting for the fossilized remains of our species' precursors. Drawing on field notes, interviews and research papers, Meave recounts the work that led to some of her and her team's greatest discoveries....Meave and her co-writer, her youngest daughter Samira Leakey, write clearly and compellingly about what these discoveries mean...A thrilling account." --BookPage *starred* "For over 50 years, British-born palaeoanthropologist Meave Leakey has been unearthing fossils of our early ancestors in Kenya's Turkana Basin. Her discoveries have changed how we think about our origins. Instead of a tidy ape-to-human progression, her work suggests different pre-human species living simultaneously. Leakey's new memoir, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past, co-written with her daughter Samira, reflects on her life in science and pieces together what we now understand about the climate-driven evolution of our species." --Guardian "An engaging memoir...A marvelous account of what it is like for a celebrated scientist to take on some of the most vital and vexing questions regarding human origins and to come up with biocultural answers." --Science "Meave 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....An illuminating memoir of an impressive scientist." --Kirkus Reviews "The Sediments of Time strikes a careful balance between pure science and a palatable account of our past . . . Working in withering heat and battling flies, dust storms, and staticky radios, Leakey's adventurous life is not for the faint of heart. But, her excitement at new discoveries is palpable . . . The memoir is a wonderful mother-daughter collaboration." --The East African "Fossils, hyaenas, and eccentric scientists almost literally jump off the page in Meave Leakey's exuberant memoir. This riveting read takes you on the unplanned but glorious adventure that has been Meave's life of discovery. Her love of learning and quest for knowledge about our origins inspire every page and will set your mind alight!" --Nina G. Jablonski, PhD, Penn State University, Author of Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color "Meave Leakey confronts extraordinary challenges that ultimately yield unimaginably rich rewards. THE SEDIMENTS OF TIME offers everything for everyone: exciting fossil finds, courageous expeditions, seminal paleoanthropological contributions to science, and convincing scientific evidence to support climate change. Meave has labored five decades filling the gaps in Homo sapien's 3+ million year journey of evolution. She also verifies global climate change by analyzing fossil teeth, 800,000 year old ocean floor ice cores, and Milankovitch's sun-earth alignment to explain global glaciation and torrid periods. She is a researcher extraordinaire." --Gilbert Grosvenor, Former President and Chairman of National Geographic "Involved for five decades in collecting, describing and interpreting an extraordinary range of fossils critical to understanding human evolution, Meave Leakey and her daughter Samira present us here with a welcome and accomplished example of accessible science writing in this engaging and deeply informed book." --David Pilbeam, PhD, Henry Ford II Research Professor of Human Evolution, Harvard University "A fascinating memoir and whirlwind tour of research into human origins by one of the preeminent explorers of our age; an inspiration for new generations of researchers and the wider public alike." --Fred Spoor, PhD, Natural History Museum, U.K. "Meave Leakey has long been recognized as one of the world's leading paleoanthropologists. In this memoir, Meave recounts her East African field expeditions and shares broad insights into anatomy, geology, paleontology, botany, language, and human behavior. Her contributions to solving some the puzzles of human evolution illustrate how field and laboratory work, analytical studies, and long-term collaborations work together to shape scientific knowledge. Hers is a remarkable and inspiring life story." --Thure Cerling, PhD, Francis Brown Presidential Chair, University of Utah "As the daughter-in-law of renowned paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, Meave Leakey had big shoes to fill -- and she did so with gusto . . . This is the story not just of Leakey's life and discoveries, but also of how our species' past could help us define and understand our future." --A Mighty Girl, 2020 Books of the Year

About the Author

MEAVE LEAKEY coheads field efforts in northern Kenya seeking fossil records to the roots of humankind. She has worked at the National Museums of Kenya since 1969 and is a research professor at Stony Brook University. SAMIRA LEAKEY has degrees from the University of London and Princeton University.