Louis Leakey Quotes

I learned that the first technology appeared in the form of stone tools, 2.6 million years ago. First entertainment comes evidence from flutes that are 35,000 years old. And evidence for first design comes 75,000 years old - beads. And you can do the same with your genes and track them back in time.

South Africa had a long record of studies in prehistory, going back to the end of the last century.

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

The first money I ever earned was for drawing stone tools.

Homo Sapiens

Stone tools are fossilized human behavior.

I kept an open mind on the question of whether a hominid had been present in Europe in the early Pleistocene.

What's changed is we now have good anatomical, geological, archaeological evidence that Neanderthals are not our ancestors. When I wrote 'Lucy,' I considered Neanderthals ancestors of modern humans. We have gone back twice the age of Lucy, six million years. And we see that upright bipedal walking goes back that far in time.

Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.

I think that many of my ideas are correct, but I'll bet you, before my death other discoveries will be made that will prompt me to alter various ideas I have about human evolution.

I was being groomed as an undergraduate to specialize in Midwestern prehistory, but going back to my teenage days, my interest has always been in our early human ancestors. I wanted to work in Africa.

As scientists, we keep an open mind, but we have to base our ideas about the past on archaeological evidence.

I, too, am convinced that our ancestors came from Africa.

In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool-wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis - man, the inventor of the city - we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages.

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.

With the discovery of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, my grandmother Mary Leakey pioneered the research in East Africa with my grandfather Louis. Many more spectacular fossil finds have since been made, both in Africa and elsewhere, by many researchers driven to understand our past.

Maybe my caveman ancestors invented the wheel or something. I'm not sure.

The trend of all knowledge at the present is to specialize, but archaeology has in it all the qualities that call for the wide view of the human race, of its growth from the savage to the civilized, which is seen in all stages of social and religious development.

Historical science is being left in the dust.

Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors that you don't get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone. Here was 40 percent of a single skeleton.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

I went to start the first Ethiopian-led project in paleoanthropology, ever. Doing that was not easy.

I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.

To investigate the history of man's development, the most important finds are, of course, hominid fossils.