No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.
Interpretation
Mary Leakey emphasizes the unique richness of knowledge that ancient art can provide compared to physical remains.
In this quote, Mary Leakey highlights the invaluable insights offered by ancient paintings, suggesting that they convey deeper understandings of human experience and culture that are not easily gleaned from the mere study of artifacts like stone and bone. This underscores the significance of art as a window into the lives, thoughts, and emotions of our ancestors, revealing more about our history than just physical remnants ever could.
In practice
During a lecture on anthropology, I might use this quote to illustrate the significance of visual culture.
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
I dug things up. I was curious. I liked to draw what I found.
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.
Basically, I have been compelled by curiosity.
[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing - one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.
The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science
I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.
Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.
All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook.
The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.
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