Huffington Magazine Issue 57 | Page 35

Voices LOUISE LEAKEY HUFFINGTON 07.14.13 SCIENCE COURTESY OF TED Is the Human Race in Danger of Going Extinct Soon? 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 fos- Louise Leakey discusses the eventual extinction of humans at a TED conference in Monterey, Calif., in 2008.