Richard Leakey
Richard Leakey
Richard Erskine Frere Leakeyis a Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician. He is second of the three sons of the archaeologists Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey, and is the younger half-brother of Colin Leakey...
NationalityKenyan
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth19 December 1944
CityNairobi, Kenya
CountryKenya
counts ground hold
Baboons, for example, live on the ground as well as in the trees, where they try to get hold of birds' eggs. What counts is the right balance.
fruit needs nutrition
Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.
humanity today way
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.
children unique parent
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.
father culture evolution
My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.
law skills survival
Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.
numbers race next
It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause
climate planets critical
Climate change: We have never faced a more critical time on our planet
hunting fossils forget
When out fossil hunting, it is very easy to forget that rather than telling you how the creatures lived, the remains you find indicate only where they became fossilized.
taken past garden
It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.
would-be survivor crash
It occurred to me that if I did not handle the crash correctly, there would be no survivors.
communication reflection language
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.
world culture language
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.
way apes facts
We are bipedal apes, and it should not be surprising to see that fact reflected in the way our ancestors lived.