Review - The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past

The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past

I received an electronic copy of this book for free via NetGalley for an honest review.

This is a well-written and informative book, and while it is an autobiographical account of Meave Leakey's life, it's also very much a discussion of what the field of paleoanthropology has learned from many of the projects she's been involved in over her long career. It does make for interesting reading, though as someone whose knowledge of the field is pretty limited to a single undergraduate course I took as a gen ed about eight years ago, I had to Google things pretty frequently while reading.

Meave Leakey has led an interesting life, and it's certainly enjoyable to read a little bit about it. The first chapters address some of the challenges she faced as a woman in science in the 1960s--she was trained as a marine biologist, but ended up working in Africa because she was repeatedly denied a place on research vessels on the justification that they did not have facilities for female researchers aboard.

The book admittedly gets a little deep in the evolutionary biology weeds for me now and then; as I said, it is well-written and it's an interesting topic, but I occasionally had to remind myself that I will not be taking an exam on changes in dentition related to diet in a changing climate, and it's okay if I don't retain all this information. For someone who has a little bit more background in this area than I do, however, I suspect these sections would be especially fascinating.

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