Meave Leakey's 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.
What The Reviewers Say
Alden Mudge,
BookPage
... masterful.
Steve Brusatte,
New York Times Book Review
In a field of celebrity scientists, nobody shines brighter than Meave Leakey.
Barbara J. King,
Science
... an engaging memoir in which fieldwork adventures appear alongside dense details of Ice Age cycles, ice core technology, fossil anatomy, and geological research. It serves as an invitation to grasp how climate cycles have driven human evolution and how anthropogenic global warming now threatens our species (and a multitude of others).
Donna Seaman,
Booklist
... an exciting and richly informative scientist’s autobiography, covering personal matters briskly, no matter how dramatic, and passionately sharing her driving fascination with our hominin ancestors and their environments. Chronicling with vivid detail the diligence and fortitude fieldwork demands, the exhilaration of major finds, and the controversies these discoveries engendered, Meave elucidates how fossils inform her compelling theories about our ancestors’ ability to outrun prey (thanks to sweat glands), making 'persistence hunting' possible; hominin social bonding and caregiving; and the crucial family role filled by older females. Ultimately, this major work of scientific dedication and original insight illuminates both our distant past and our current, serious, human-caused planetary challenges..