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.
One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.
To stop short in any research that bids fair to widen the gates of knowledge, to recoil from fear of difficulty or adverse criticism, is to bring reproach on science. There is nothing for the investigator to do but go straight on, 'to explore up and down, inch by inch, with the taper his reason;' to follow the light wherever it may lead, even should it at times resemble a will-o'-the-wisp.
The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.
Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
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