Richard Leakey - The Origin of Humankind (1994)

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This tendency to anthropomorphize flows naturally from the context in which consciousness evolved. Consciousness is a social tool for understanding the behavior of others by modelling it on one's own feelings.

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

Richard Leakey
Three revolutions mark the history of life on earth. The first was the origin of life itself... The second... was the origin of multicellular organisms... The origin of human consciousness... was the third... Life became aware of itself, and began to transform the world of nature to its own ends.

Richard Leakey
If the molecular evidence is correct... almost five million years passed between the time our ancestors became bipedal and the time when they started making stone tools. Whatever the evolutionary force that produced a bipedal ape, it was not linked with the ability to make and use tools. However, many anthropologists believe that the advent of technology 2.5 million years ago did coincide with the beginnings of brain expansion.

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
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
The neurobiologist Harry Jerison has made a long study of the trajectory of brain evolution since the advent of life on dry land.... the origin of new faunal groups is usually accompanied by a jump in the relative size of the brain, known as encephalization.... the first archaic mammals... were equipped with brains four to five times bigger than the average reptilian brain... primates are twice as encephalized as the average mammal. Within primates, the apes... are some twice the average size. And humans are three times as encephalized as the average ape.

Richard Leakey
If the Darwinian package were correct, then we would expect to see the simultaneous appearance in the archeological and fossil records of evidence for bipedality, technology and increased brain size. We don't.

Richard Leakey
[Fred] Spoor's observations are truly startling, In all species of the genus Homo, the inner ear structure is indistinguishable from that of modern humans. Similarly, in all species of Australopithecus, the semicircular canals look like those of apes. Does this mean that the australopithecines moved about as apes do—that is, quadrupedally? The structure of the pelvis and lower limbs speaks against this conclusion. So does a remarkable discovery my mother made in 1976: a trail of very humanlike footprints made in a layer of volcanic ash some 3.75 million years ago.

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
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
The challenge for individuals in primate societies is to be able to predict the behavior of others. One way would be for individuals to have a huge mental bank in their brains, which stored every possible action of their fellow troop members and their own appropriate actions.

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

Richard Leakey
When our ancestors discovered the trick of consistently producing sharp stone flakes, it constituted a major breakthrough in human prehistory.... The modest flake... is a highly effective implement for cutting through all but the toughest of hides... the humans who made and used these simple stone flakes thereby availed themselves of a new energy source—animal protein.

Richard Leakey