Richard Leakey Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

Of the range of images in Upper Paleolithic art, the most arresting are the therianthropes. There are not many... but they seize the imagination. The most famous is the so-called sorcerer... In a manner unusual for Upper Paleolithic images, the sorcerer is staring directly out of the wall, a full-face stare that transfixes the spectator.

Richard Leakey
The first major discovery of prehistoric art was the Spanish cave of Altamira, which, like Lascaux, is one of the most spectacular examples of Upper Paleolithic art yet known.

Richard Leakey
It is impossible to imagine existence in the absence of subjective sensation we call reflective consciousness.

Richard Leakey
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.

Richard Leakey
Natural selection operates according to immediate circumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendent of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

Richard Leakey
Next to the discovery of the Turkana boy, the visit to Lascaux ranks as one of the great moments of my life.

Richard Leakey
In order to be able to deceive intentionally, an animal must have a sense of how its actions appear to another individual. Such an ability requires self-awareness.

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
A vital leap in the evolution of intellectual capacity would have been the ability to form concepts, to conceive of individual objects as belonging to distinct classes, and thus do away with the almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another. Concepts, moreover, can be manipulated and this is the root of abstract thought and of invention. The formation of concepts is also a necessary, but apparently not sufficient, condition for the emergence of language.

Richard Leakey
Prehistoric images speak to us more evocatively than any other element of the archeological record: colorful, vibrant paintings of horses, of bison, of a panoply of animals and humans that often seem alive and in motion. And yet there is a dimension of unreality about them... The images seem plucked from life... often arranged chaotically to our eye, frequently superimposed... sometimes apparently incomplete.... There is an enigma in these images, a profound challenge to our understanding of the past.

Richard Leakey
I think both Louis and I were looking for more or less the same thing, and that is, when did our species, Homo, begin?

Richard Leakey
The major sites, such as Altamira, are often surrounded by smaller sites within a 10-mile radius, as if they were centers of political or social alliance.

Richard Leakey
It appears that the evolutionary process promotes its own progress: learning about the environment (which demands a certain intelligence) means living in a stable social mileau (which demands at least an equal and possibly a greater intelligence); as social intelligence increases, so too will the ability to learn; this in turn encourages an even longer social apprenticeship; and longer group living leads to more social intelligence.

Richard Leakey
Jerison argues that we should think of brains as creating a species' version of reality.... As brains enlarged through evolutionary time, more channels of sensory information could be handled more completely, and their input integrated more thoroughly.

Richard Leakey
When a San Shaman goes into a trance, he harnesses that power, becomes part of the world beyond, becomes invisible to the singers and dancers around him, and draws images on the rock face. Ask the San who drew the images, and they say the spirits. And the rock face is more than a surface for the paint; it is the boundary of this world and the world beyond.... part of the meaning of it all, and the rock shelter itself assumes a special status, a place of veneration.

Richard Leakey
The first era of the Upper Paleolithic, the Aurignacian, is notable for several reasons, one of which is the absence of painted caves.... One of the most evocative pieces from this era, from the Abri Blanchard in southwestern France, is a flute. Music must have been an integral part of Upper Paleolithic life too.

Richard Leakey
The painted, engraved, and carved images of prehistory are threads from past cultures, and we are foreigners trying to interpret their meaning. Perhaps more than anything else, art can be fully understood only in the context of the culture that produced it.

Richard Leakey
I'm known for speaking my mind, a trait I probably inherited from my parents, Louis and Mary Leakey—neither of whom was renowned for tact.

Richard Leakey
Ever since Darwin tied knots between human beings and the rest of the animal world, many people have frantically attempted to untie them again, declaring that even though our roots are in the animal world we have left them so far behind as to make any comparisons utterly meaningless. To some extent this is true, because the quality that makes us unique in the biological kingdom is the enormous capacity to learn.

Richard Leakey