What Is Leakey Quotes

#1. When we find a fossil, we mark it. Today, we've got great technology: we have GPS. We mark it with a GPS fix, and we also take a digital photograph of the specimen, so we could essentially put it back on the surface, exactly where we found it.

Louise Leakey

#2. I quite liked having a baby - I think I won't put it more strongly than that. But I had no intention of allowing motherhood to disrupt my work as an archeologist.

Mary Leakey

#3. I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.

Richard E. Leakey

#4. I go once a year to the Serengeti to see the wildebeest migrations because that means a lot to me, but I avoid Olduvai if I can because it is a ruin. It is most depressing.

Mary Leakey

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

Richard Leakey

#6. To save an animal's life in order that it may suffer indefinitely is something I would never condone.

Louis Leakey

#7. Far too often animals are put to sleep when they could be saved through proper care and nursing.

Louis Leakey

#8. Raising funds for my fourth expedition proved to be very difficult.

Louis Leakey

#9. Colonial governors and senior civil servants are not easy people to argue with, and I was not popular because of my criticism of the colonial service in Kenya.

Louis Leakey

#10. I felt that in time simple stone tools would be found in early Pleistocene in England.

Louis Leakey

#11. It's important to remember that we evolved. Now, I know that's a dirty word for some people, but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas, the chimpanzee and also the bonobos. We have a common past, and we have a common future.

Louise Leakey

#12. 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.

Richard Leakey

#13. What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.

Louise Leakey

#14. The Dalmatian breed of dog has many primitive characteristics.

Louis Leakey

#15. 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.

Richard Leakey

#16. Now this really is something to put on the mantelpiece.

Mary Leakey

#17. At Olduvai, for 20 years, Mary and I had investigated and made a general survey of the overall geology.

Louis Leakey

#18. The author knows just what he wants to illustrate and how he would like it to be done.

Louis Leakey

#19. I have been raised to believe in freedom of thought and speech. If a minority wishes to accept that position it's their right. What I fear is that this minority may seem to be larger than it truly is. What is strange is that there are still people who believe the world is not a globe.

Richard Leakey

#20. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.

Richard Leakey

#21. You only find what you are looking for, really, if the truth be known.

Mary Leakey

#22. 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.

Richard Leakey

#23. If you want to become a fossil, you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface. And then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you.

Louise Leakey

#24. The majority of people in Angola were not provided with any kind of schooling and were completely illiterate, very badly paid, and treated almost as slaves.

Louis Leakey

#25. When my father arrived in Kenya, he had found the Kikuyu way of life similar to that of the British at the time the Romans invaded England 2,000 years ago.

Louis Leakey

#26. I have examined the stomach contents of seven aardvarks.

Louis Leakey

#27. 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.

Richard Leakey

#28. One should not forget that there are very few surviving items from this period, often just single, small bones, a tooth, a sliver of the skull. Categorizing these pieces can be very difficult.

Richard Leakey

#29. She stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.

Mary Leakey

#30. When I met Richard Leakey, I thought, 'This is the most charismatic man I've ever met.' He has no legs. He lost them when his plane was sabotaged. But he's an interesting, sort of narcissistic guy.

Eric Roth

#31. What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.

Louise Leakey

#32. Elephants can live to an age of up to 70 or 80 years and they have a good memory. It could be they come across an area that is experiencing a drought. Then they continue on their path and run into people.

Richard Leakey

#33. 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.

Richard Leakey

#34. 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.

Richard Leakey

#35. Echoing the criticism made of his father's habilis skulls, he added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it was 'imagination made of plaster of Paris', thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to.

Richard Leakey

#36. I saw what looked like another fallen tree in front of me and put my foot on it to cross over. At that moment it reared up in front of me-the biggest python I had ever seen!

Louis Leakey

#37. Although we followed that hyena for the best part of half an hour, we never caught up with it.

Louis Leakey

#38. I'd rather be in a tent than in a house.

Mary Leakey

#39. 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.

Richard Leakey

#40. Eloquent testimony to the recovery powers of wild animals frequently becomes apparent from the study of skeletons housed in museums.

Louis Leakey

#41. Most Kikuyu marriages were arranged on the basis of what is described by anthropologists as the bride price.

Louis Leakey

#42. 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.

Richard Leakey