Word: leakey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MAKING OF MANKIND by Richard E. Leakey Button; 256 pages...
Anthropologist Richard Leakey opens his tour d'horizon by describing some of his own finds, including the famed skull 1470 that revealed Homo habilis, the first true man, to be more than 2 million years old. Always giving credit where it is due, Leakey goes on to describe the earlier findings in South Africa of Raymond Dart and Robert Broom, who unearthed human ancestors more than 3 million years old, as well as to discuss Don Johanson's dramatic discovery of Lucy, the famous four-foot-tall Ethiopian who walked upright at least 3 million years...
...Fossils, Leakey makes clear, are essential to any understanding of man's origins. But, he maintains, bones are not enough: "The search for our origins consists of far more than simply identifying the characters in the play: we need to know what they did, when they arrived on the stage, and when and why they departed...
...learn some of these matters, Leakey and his colleagues have recently concentrated on such living fossils as the tribesmen of the Kalahari, who live much as man's earliest ancestors did, foraging for vegetables, sharing meat when they hunt successfully, carrying their culture in their heads. His conclusion is refreshingly optimistic: there is no proof in the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari that man is an inherently violent "killer ape." The modern urge to mass violence appears to be acquired, not inherited...
...Leakey, the chairman of FROM, discussed several areas for investigation, including the point at which man and ape diverged in the evolutionary sequence, the causes of the brain enlargement of man and his most recent ancestors, and the origins of primitive art. He also argued that it was the move to a bipedal stance--not the development of tool-making or the enlargement of the brain--that spurred man's evolution...