Richard Leakey Quotes

None of the three great apes is considered ancestral to modern man, Homo sapiens, but they remain the only other type of extant primate with which human beings share such close physical characteristics. From them we may learn much concerning the behavior of our earliest primate prototypes, because behavior, unlike bones, teeth, or tools, does not fossilize.

My degrees are in anthropology, and I have friends who have worked with apes.

Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.

Man is more ape than many of the apes.

Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

The difference between humans and Neanderthals is .004 percent of gene code. That's how big the difference is, one species to another.

When I realized, in 1978, that Lucy did represent a new species of human ancestor, and that I had an opportunity to name this new species, I realized this was a revolutionary step in understanding human origins.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

We are apes - we should be climbing.

Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes - he didn't go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.

The chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.

Three and a half million years ago our ancestors - yours and mine - left these traces [indicates footprints]. We stood up and parted ways from them. Once we were standing on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated on the ground. Now, we were free to look up and wonder.

Paleontologists do not have to search for famous "missing link" from which humans supposedly came, and current great apes. This link is simply the socialist - because he has both monkey genes.

Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape.

From a genomic perspective, we are all Africans.

I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam.

Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.

We're still just the world's premium brand of ape.

I'm reading Hans Kummer's "In Quest of the Sacred Baboon." It's wonderful. It's a scientist's journal about baboons, but it relates to the search for human origin.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.

I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.