She turned a branch into a bush

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, anthropology, anthropologists, human origins

I once read about Maeve Leakey that as a girl she would work a jigsaw puzzle from the back, not seeing the picture; this prepared her to work as an anthropologist, matching chips and slivers of fossil bone to reconstruct a skull or a mandible or part of a femur. Although she doesn't mention this youthful skill in her memoir The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past (co-written with Samira Leakey), she does tell of herself and her team members spending hundreds or thousands of hours piecing bits of fossil together. In the landscapes where she works, it is rare to find a scrap of bone as large as a hand, or even a finger.

While I typically find or generate an image relevant to a book I will review, in this case I could do no better than the cover photographer. This picture is a classic portrait of the remarkable paleoanthropologist.

The book touches on her younger life, but primarily begins when she had finished her PhD and was planning to work with living primates. She was invited to join an expedition with Louis Leakey in Kenya. It isn't clear when she moved to Kenya permanently, but she has lived primarily in that country ever since. She published Sediments in 2020 while her husband Richard Leakey was living; he died in 2022. Certain segments of the book outline his health challenges: Kidney disease beginning in 1969, multiple kidney transplants beginning about ten years later, and a liver transplant much later. Naturally, these episodes affected her and her work, but she persevered.

Maeve and her husband shared an admirable combination of formidable technical skills with great administrative ability, though their personalities and styles differed quite a bit. This enabled Maeve to carry on the anthropology, including fundraising and directing teams of workers while Richard filled crucial roles in major conservation organizations. Throughout the book and in the Acknowledgements she credits numerous field assistants, mostly Kenyans, whose labors enabled the tremendous scientific achievements we read about.

The thread that runs throughout is the conviction Maeve had from very early that the evolutionary path from the human-chimpanzee common ancestor to the genus Homo and then the species Homo sapiens (us) was not linear, but was one pathway through a branching bush. Near the end of the book she points out that in the period roughly 1.4-2 million years ago there were typically four hominin (human related or ancestral) species sharing the landscape of northeastern Africa. 

Further, when "early modern" H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe for the last time in prehistory, about 60-70,000 years ago, they came into the presence of the descendants of earlier migrations, the Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. There are hints that another hominin species or two existed alongside them. We do know that modern Eurasians bear a small percentage of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. Her image of a "family bush" has been vindicated.

I have read a few other books about the life and work of Richard's parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, who stand as monuments of the field, and of Richard's work. This book rounds out the collection, full of stories of a top scientist among stellar scientists, who has herself become a monument, a living legend. It helps that she is a master storyteller. I loved this book.