The Magnificent Mary Leakey Essay -- Exploratory Essays Research Paper

The Magnificent Mary Leakey Mary Leakey died on December 9, 1996. She loved to smoke Dutch cigars, as if everyday were some kind of celebration; strong tobacco was one of her vices. Hers was a life of constant commencement. She never attended colleges, though she did receive numerous honorary degrees in Britain and America: "I have worked for them by digging in the sun," she said. She first gained recognition in 1948 for discovering a 16 million year old fossilized cranium of a hominid thought to be the missing link, one she called "Proconsul". But she only found it and named it. "I never felt interpretation was my job," she said. "What I came to do was to dig up things and take them out as well as I could. There is so much that we do not know, and the more we do know, the more we realize that early interpretations were completely wrong. It is good mental exercise, but people get so hot and nasty about it, which I think is ridiculous." She really was a no-nonsense woman, one who was perhaps more preoccupied with nonsense than she realized. As an explorer of concrete material, her primary and determined pursuit of fossils, bones, and human origins antagonized the speculative nature of her profession. She found beauty in the tangible history of human ancestry. "What was it like?" was simply not a question she entertained. More important was the question "What was it?" Once, three "man-apes," as Leakey called them, traversed a plain, accidentally leaving some of the most formidable scientific data we have about our ancestor-cousins. Is that how it happens? Is our universe a continuum of chaos out of which we construct a simplicity that is both pleasing and functional? And is ours a reality by these attempts—or perhap... ...familiarity. Embarkation begins with a choice, and choice is a product of self-consciousness. We have been alive for so long, as has love and anger, resolve and obsession. With the million and one options that fight for our attention in a hyper-society like our own, reluctance can cost us everything. As a society, as a species, progress is our handle, the drive toward better and more hopeful situations is our enterprise. But the drive is also a specific one, localized and partitioned in every individual to find the next best condition. For senior preschoolers to senior graduate students to senior citizens transitioning into eternity, the origin of our motions are the same: the inescapable need to move on as where we are no longer suits us. Who were these individuals? Who were these three who walked together in the rain? The answer is simple and magnificent. The Magnificent Mary Leakey Essay -- Exploratory Essays Research Paper The Magnificent Mary Leakey Mary Leakey died on December 9, 1996. She loved to smoke Dutch cigars, as if everyday were some kind of celebration; strong tobacco was one of her vices. Hers was a life of constant commencement. She never attended colleges, though she did receive numerous honorary degrees in Britain and America: "I have worked for them by digging in the sun," she said. She first gained recognition in 1948 for discovering a 16 million year old fossilized cranium of a hominid thought to be the missing link, one she called "Proconsul". But she only found it and named it. "I never felt interpretation was my job," she said. "What I came to do was to dig up things and take them out as well as I could. There is so much that we do not know, and the more we do know, the more we realize that early interpretations were completely wrong. It is good mental exercise, but people get so hot and nasty about it, which I think is ridiculous." She really was a no-nonsense woman, one who was perhaps more preoccupied with nonsense than she realized. As an explorer of concrete material, her primary and determined pursuit of fossils, bones, and human origins antagonized the speculative nature of her profession. She found beauty in the tangible history of human ancestry. "What was it like?" was simply not a question she entertained. More important was the question "What was it?" Once, three "man-apes," as Leakey called them, traversed a plain, accidentally leaving some of the most formidable scientific data we have about our ancestor-cousins. Is that how it happens? Is our universe a continuum of chaos out of which we construct a simplicity that is both pleasing and functional? And is ours a reality by these attempts—or perhap... ...familiarity. Embarkation begins with a choice, and choice is a product of self-consciousness. We have been alive for so long, as has love and anger, resolve and obsession. With the million and one options that fight for our attention in a hyper-society like our own, reluctance can cost us everything. As a society, as a species, progress is our handle, the drive toward better and more hopeful situations is our enterprise. But the drive is also a specific one, localized and partitioned in every individual to find the next best condition. For senior preschoolers to senior graduate students to senior citizens transitioning into eternity, the origin of our motions are the same: the inescapable need to move on as where we are no longer suits us. Who were these individuals? Who were these three who walked together in the rain? The answer is simple and magnificent.