Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Leakey

Leakey’s casual “of course” is doing a lot of work. It’s the voice of a field scientist flattening a century of public mythmaking: if you want the story of human becoming, start with bones, not with wishful thinking, patriotic origin tales, or armchair philosophy. The line is plainspoken, but it’s a quiet power move. It narrows the argument to evidence you can touch, measure, date, and fight over in peer review.

The intent is methodological discipline. “Investigate” frames human origins as a continuing inquiry, not a settled script. “Man’s development” signals the old-school phrasing of mid-20th-century anthropology, but the idea is modern: humans are a biological lineage embedded in deep time. By calling hominid fossils “the most important finds,” Leakey elevates the material record above everything else that tempts us to improvise a tidy narrative - tools, myths, even DNA (which later became decisive, but still needs calibration against fossils).

Subtext: the past is stingy. Fossils are rare, fragmentary, politically charged (who owns them, who gets credit), and yet they’re the closest thing to a hard receipt for evolution. Leakey came out of the East African crucible where a jaw fragment can redraw textbooks and where scientific authority is earned by insisting on the unglamorous chain from excavation to classification. As an environmentalist, there’s also a present-tense warning humming underneath: understand what we are by tracing what we were, because species that forget their ecological origins tend to behave like they’re exempt from limits.