Richard Leakey quotes - page 3

If the Darwinian package were correct, then we would expect to see the simultaneous appearance in the archeological and fossil records of evidence for bipedality, technology and increased brain size. We don't. (Richard Leakey)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Richard Leakey
I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils. View quote
Richard Leakey
We think that groups of between 30 and 40 early men would have settled in an area measuring a hundred square kilometers. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Richard Leakey
I, too, am convinced that our ancestors came from Africa. (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. View quote
Richard Leakey