The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past

Paleoanthropologist Leakey’s disappointing debut memoir isn’t nearly as illuminating about her storied career as one might hope. Writing with the aid of her daughter Samira, Leakey shares bits of her life, mentioning almost in passing the births of her two daughters and her marriage to a fellow paleoanthropologist, Richard Leakey, but her main focus is on the discoveries she and her team made about the fossil record of early humans and pre-humans. These include the 1999 discovery of a skull that she identified as coming from a previously unknown species of hominin: Kenyanthropus platyops, or “flat-faced man from Kenya.” The fossils drive her story to such an extent that the chronology of her career is difficult to follow. Leakey also spends significant time providing readers with rudimentary scientific grounding largely tangential to her story, discussing, in an accessible, if rather pedestrian, manner topics such as how climate works, the ability that some nonhuman primates have to use language, and the methodology used to acquire and age Antarctic ice cores. Leakey’s fascinating life and work deserve more attention than they received in this volume. Agent: Gillian MacKenzie, MacKenzie Wolf. (Aug.)