Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British scientist Mary Leakey.
Last updated on November 20, 2024.
Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetoli footprints, and at the Laetoli site she discovered hominin fossils that were more than 3.75 million years old.
Now this really is something to put on the mantelpiece.
I dug things up. I was curious. I liked to draw what I found.
No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.
Theories come and go, but fundamental data always remain the same.
I quite liked having a baby - I think I won't put it more strongly than that. But I had no intention of allowing motherhood to disrupt my work as an archeologist.
I got too old to live in the bush. You really need to be youngish and healthy, so it seemed stupid to keep going.
I'd rather be in a tent than in a house.
She stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.
The first money I ever earned was for drawing stone tools.
You only find what you are looking for, really, if the truth be known.
I had never passed a single school exam, and clearly never would.
Basically, I have been compelled by curiosity.
I never felt interpretation was my job.
I go once a year to the Serengeti to see the wildebeest migrations because that means a lot to me, but I avoid Olduvai if I can because it is a ruin. It is most depressing.
There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist-musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn... No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely
Theories come and go, but fundamental data always remains.