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
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.
water needs layers
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.
elephants people poaching
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.
distance military police
Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.
roots giving looks
To me it's a question of being able to look backward and give the present a root... To give meaning to where we are today, we need to look at where we have come from.
kenya migrants impossible
It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.
numbers people environmental
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.
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.
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.