Richard Leakey

Well, let's see.

What did Richard Leakey say about me? He said, your book is pure humbug.

Nobody would take it seriously, but a fool.

You know, you get that kind of thing.

It wasn't just the species that you had.

It was where you had to go to get it, right, and what you had to do and the story of each animal and also – the glamour that I think is not anywhere near as present in the world as it was at that time of, you know, showing up in Kenya and being the guest of, you know, some wayward son of Richard Leakey, it's the Leakey family, the anthropologists, right? But these were, this was the waning days of like the colonial empires.

You're talking about, you know, the 1970s in Hank's case, you know, to go to Papua New Guinea and be received by these, you know, remaining people white farmers in the hills or something like that, and then sit around and hunt reptiles and drink beer or whatever you're going to do.

That's not something most people can do.

Omo Kibish in Ethiopia gave us something even more important.

in nineteen sixty seven richard leakey's team found two partial skulls omo hoai and omo too in sediments along the omo river for decades they were thought to be about one hundred thirty thousand years old but in two thousand and five new dating techniques pushed that age back to one hundred and ninety five thousand years these were homo sapiens anatomically modern humans and they were far older than anyone had expected omo kibbees showed that our species has been around for at least two hundred thousand years all of it in africa then came jebel ir houd in morocco in twenty seventeen excavations at this site produced the oldest known homo sapiens fossils yet discovered 315,000 years old.

The skull showed a mix of modern and archaic features.

The face looked modern, but the skull was still somewhat elongated.