Is The Human Race In Danger Of Becoming Extinct Soon?
by Louise Leakey
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/Posted: 07/05/2013 8:00 AM
Updated: 07/07/2013
In the rush of today's world, and with more than half of us now living in cities, the majority of people are less and less connected with the spectacle of Nature. How many of us stop to think about our place on the planet, and how close we came as a species to going extinct just 75,000 years ago? How many of us appreciate that all our roots are African, as Homo sapiens left the continent only some 75,000 years ago to populate the globe?
The fossil record presents an opportunity to contemplate how this human story unfolded, although we will never find the fossils that represent the complete record, as preservational events are in themselves very rare. 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. These are exciting times, and new and often unexpected finds are announced quite regularly. Since I presented this TEDTalk in 2008, we now know of several new species of hominins from different places in Africa, including additional fossil material from Lake Turkana, helping us to understand our own genus Homo.
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