Richard Leakey Short Quotes

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I just find the fossils. I'll leave it to the experts to name them.

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

Richard Leakey
Where Breuil has seen chaos—or at least, randomness—in wall art, Leroi-Gourhan sought and found order.

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

Richard Leakey
We are bipedal apes, and it should not be surprising to see that fact reflected in the way our ancestors lived.

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
Culture represents a novelty in the world of nature, and it could have added an effective, unifying edge to the forces of natural selection.

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
Needless to say, language and consciousness, which are among the most prized features of Homo Sapiens, leave no trace in the prehistoric record.

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

Richard Leakey
The quality that accompanies the emergence of learning in the evolution of higher animals, namely intelligence, is surprisingly difficult to define.

Richard Leakey
Rather than living as aggregations of families in nomadic bands, as modern hunter-gatherers do, the first humans probably lived like savanna baboons.

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
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
The question... is whether Upper Paleolithic art bears the telltale signs of Lewis-Williams' three stage neuropsychological model, and could thus be shamanistic art.

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
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
In its extreme form self-awareness manifests itself in notions such as that of the soul, but in simple form it merely means to be aware of oneself as an individual among others.

Richard Leakey
As a species, we are blessed with a curiosity about the world of nature and our place in it. We want to know — need to know — how we came to be as we are, and what our future is.

Richard Leakey