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.
Science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.
We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.
I think chemistry is being frittered away by the hairsplitting of the organic chemists; we have new compounds discovered, which scarcely differ from the known ones and when discovered are valueless-very illustrations perhaps of their refinements in analysis, but very little aiding the progress of true science.
Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker. Although the universe doesn’t have an end, it had a beginning in the Big Bang. One might ask what is before that but the answer is that there is nowhere before the Big Bang just as there is nowhere south of the South Pole.
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
We live in the hope and faith that, by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by-and-by be able to see our way as clearly from the constituents of water to the properties of water, as we are now able to deduce the operations of a watch from the form of its parts and the manner in which they are put together.
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