Richard Leakey quotes - page 3
Richard Leakey was a renowned Kenyan environmentalist, paleoanthropologist, and conservationist. His work contributed greatly to our understanding of human evolution and to wildlife protection in Africa. He played a crucial role in fighting poaching and raising awareness about the importance of conserving natural resources. Here are 62 of his quotes:
If the molecular evidence is correct... almost five million years passed between the time our ancestors became bipedal and the time when they started making stone tools. Whatever the evolutionary force that produced a bipedal ape, it was not linked with the ability to make and use tools. However, many anthropologists believe that the advent of technology 2.5 million years ago did coincide with the beginnings of brain expansion.
Richard Leakey
We are justified in calling all species of bipedal ape "human."... the adaptation of bipedalism was so loaded with evolutionary potential-freeing the upper limbs to be free to become manipulative implements one day-that its importance should be recognized in our nomenclature. These humans were not like us, but without the bipedal adaptation they couldn't have become us.
Richard Leakey
The neurobiologist Harry Jerison has made a long study of the trajectory of brain evolution since the advent of life on dry land. ...the origin of new faunal groups is usually accompanied by a jump in the relative size of the brain, known as encephalization. ...the first archaic mammals... were equipped with brains four to five times bigger than the average reptilian brain... primates are twice as encephalized as the average mammal. Within primates, the apes... are some twice the average size. And humans are three times as encephalized as the average ape.
Richard Leakey
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.
Richard Leakey
Richard Leakey
Photo:
Rob Bogaerts / Anefo,
CC BY 4.0
Occupation: Kenyan Environmentalist
Born: December 19, 1944
Died: January 2, 2022
Quotes count: 62
Wikipedia: Richard Leakey
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