60 Quotes by Richard Leakey

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.

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.

My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.

Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.

It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause

Climate change: We have never faced a more critical time on our planet

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.

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.

It occurred to me that if I did not handle the crash correctly, there would be no survivors.