Richard Leakey Quotes
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.
Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.
To have arrived on this earth as a product of a biological accident, only to depart through human arrogance, would be the ultimate irony.
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.
Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.
In the area of species protection, we should concern ourselves with what is right as opposed to what might be easier, or popular in the short term.
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.
Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.
It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause
The world's five thousand extant languages are products of our shared ability, but the five thousand cultures they create are separate from each other.
Ritual disposal of the dead speaks clearly of an awareness of death, and thus an awareness of self.
Sadly, I am not able to take part in the fieldwork myself so much anymore, as both of my legs were amputated following an airplane crash twelve years ago.
We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.
To investigate the history of man's development, the most important finds are, of course, hominid fossils.
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.
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.
It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.
The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels.
It occurred to me that if I did not handle the crash correctly, there would be no survivors.
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.
My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.
Culture represents a novelty in the world of nature, and it could have added an effective, unifying edge to the forces of natural selection.
We are bipedal apes, and it should not be surprising to see that fact reflected in the way our ancestors lived.
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.