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
mind apes problem
The problem of the apes is not a shortage of money, it is a shortage of strategy. Let us devote our minds... the one thing we have more of than other apes... and let's secure their future.
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.
west east north-africa
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.
elephants tourists tourism
The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels.
discovery long tasks
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.
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
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.
kenya migrants impossible
It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.
nature world novelty
Culture represents a novelty in the world of nature, and it could have added an effective, unifying edge to the forces of natural selection.
way apes facts
We are bipedal apes, and it should not be surprising to see that fact reflected in the way our ancestors lived.
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.
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.