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.