Great Throughts Treasury

"Colonial governors and senior civil servants are not easy people to argue with, and I was not popular because of my criticism of the colonial service in Kenya."

"At Olduvai, for 20 years, Mary and I had investigated and made a general survey of the overall geology."

"I felt that in time simple stone tools would be found in early Pleistocene in England."

"I kept an open mind on the question of whether a hominid had been present in Europe in the early Pleistocene."

"Far too often animals are put to sleep when they could be saved through proper care and nursing."

"Most Kikuyu marriages were arranged on the basis of what is described by anthropologists as the bride price."

"I put a bullet into the back of the crocodile's neck just behind the head, thus killing it. If a crocodile is hit in any other part of its anatomy it disappears into the water and is irrecoverable."

"If you want to become a fossil, you need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the Earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface. And then you hope that one of us [paleontologists] will walk around and find small pieces of you."

"I saw what looked like another fallen tree in front of me and put my foot on it to cross over. At that moment it reared up in front of me-the biggest python I had ever seen!"

"Sometimes string figures were used to illustrate stories, as in the case of an Eskimo example that depicts a man catching a salmon. Sometimes they had magic or religious significance."

"The Dalmatian breed of dog has many primitive characteristics."

"South Africa had a long record of studies in prehistory, going back to the end of the last century."

"Sometime during the many millions of years that have elapsed since mammalian faunas came into existence, some sort of island crossed from West Africa to South America."

"The Foxhall jaw has now been missing for many years."

"The trip I made to Angola to study the prehistoric contents of the gravel beds as a means of deciding the age of the deposits and their economic potential was the first time prehistory had ever been used for such a purpose."

"The majority of people in Angola were not provided with any kind of schooling and were completely illiterate, very badly paid, and treated almost as slaves."

"We set up the promised clinic for the sick and wounded Masai."

"To save an animal's life in order that it may suffer indefinitely is something I would never condone."

"What is it that really makes us, us? It?s our collective intelligence. It?s our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness."

"When my father arrived in Kenya, he had found the Kikuyu way of life similar to that of the British at the time the Romans invaded England 2,000 years ago."

"There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating."