Richard Leakey Quotes

Elephants can live to an age of up to 70 or 80 years and they have a good memory. It could be they come across an area that is experiencing a drought. Then they continue on their path and run into people.

— Richard Leakey

“Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.”

— Richard Leakey

“A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year, we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge.”

— Richard Leakey

“The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels.”

— Richard Leakey

One should not forget that there are very few surviving items from this period, often just single, small bones, a tooth, a sliver of the skull. Categorizing these pieces can be very difficult.

— Richard Leakey

“I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.”

— Richard Leakey

“Earlier, 100,000 elephants lived in Kenya and we didn't have any noteworthy problem with it. The problem that we have is not that there are now more elephants.”

— Richard Leakey

“I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils.”

— Richard Leakey

Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.

— Richard Leakey

“We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.”

— Richard Leakey

“For fossils to thrive, certain favorable circumstances are required. First of all, of course, remnants of life have to be there. These then need to be washed over with water as soon as possible, so that the bones are covered with a layer of sediment.”

— Richard Leakey

“It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.”

— Richard Leakey

“I, too, am convinced that our ancestors came from Africa.”

— Richard Leakey

“Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task.”

— Richard Leakey

“Scientific innovations continually provide us with new means of analyzing the finds.”

— Richard Leakey

“To investigate the history of man's development, the most important finds are, of course, hominid fossils.”

— Richard Leakey

We think that groups of between 30 and 40 early men would have settled in an area measuring a hundred square kilometers.

— Richard Leakey

“Sadly, I am not able to take part in the fieldwork myself so much anymore, as both of my legs were amputated following an airplane crash twelve years ago.”

— Richard Leakey

“We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed.”

— Richard Leakey

The land is not in the least bit fertile and yet the cattle herds grow larger and larger. A cow represents capital investment here.

— Richard Leakey

“Whether or not all this came to pass in an East African ditch, I wouldn't like to say. Perhaps it happened in North Africa or further west, but Africa was definitely the place.”

— Richard Leakey

“The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants.”

— Richard Leakey

In the area of species protection, we should concern ourselves with what is right as opposed to what might be easier, or popular in the short term.

— Richard Leakey

“To have arrived on this earth as a product of a biological accident, only to depart through human arrogance, would be the ultimate irony.”

— Richard Leakey

The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.

— Richard Leakey

“Echoing the criticism made of his father's habilis skulls, he added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it was 'imagination made of plaster of Paris', thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to.”

— Richard Leakey

“The whole story is about change. We are very lucky that the earth's history is recorded in fossilized remains. And we can see the changes. Unfortunately, there will always be gaps in our knowledge, but there is no doubt that we and everything living today has evolved.”

— Richard Leakey

“I have been raised to believe in freedom of thought and speech. If a minority wishes to accept that position it's their right. What I fear is that this minority may seem to be larger than it truly is. What is strange is that there are still people who believe the world is not a globe.”

— Richard Leakey

“Natural selection operates according to immediate cirumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.”

— Richard Leakey

“Ritual disposal of the dead speaks clearly of an awareness of death, and thus an awareness of self.”

— Richard Leakey

“Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.”

— Richard Leakey

“The greatest problem we face is the growing number of people living in poverty. The related sense of hopelessness has to be impacting on every part of environmental management.”

— Richard Leakey

“As every parent knows, children go through an adolescent growth spurt, during which they put on inches at an alarming rate. Humans are unique in this respect: most mammalian species, including apes, progress almost directly from infancy to adulthood.”

— Richard Leakey

“It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.”

— Richard Leakey

“Spoken language clearly differentiates Homo sapiens from all other creatures. None but humankind produces a complex spoken language, a medium for communication and a medium for introspective reflection.”

— Richard Leakey

The world's five thousand extant languages are products of our shared ability, but the five thousand cultures they create are separate from each other.

— Richard Leakey

“We are bipedal apes, and it should not be surprising to see that fact reflected in the way our ancestors lived.”

— Richard Leakey

“Culture represents a novelty in the world of nature, and it could have added an effective, unifying edge to the forces of natural selection.”

— Richard Leakey

“I ... believe the study of human history remains important and should not be banned. We should ensure that any archaeological studies are conducted with sensitivity and respect. Reburying relics, in my view, does not help anyone go anywhere.”

— Richard Leakey

“My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.”

— Richard Leakey

“It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause”

— Richard Leakey

Climate change: We have never faced a more critical time on our planet

— Richard Leakey