Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human

This is the personal account of Richard Leakey's search for not only human origins, but also the origin of humanity. Since writing "Origins" in 1978, Leakey has shifted his studies from the eastern to the western shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The recent discovery of the West Turkana skeleton, the virtually complete remains of a 16-year-old youth who died 1.6 million years ago, has led him to re-evaluate his previous work. Richard Leakey questions the widely accepted idea of a 2 million-year-old ancestry of hunters and gatherers - the men hunting, the women raising children - that is the basis of modern man's nuclear family, and asks why the first signs of humanity occurred a mere 15,000 years ago in the cave paintings of Lascaux. What was going on in the minds of men before that first recorded expression of art and humanity occurred? Richard Leakey also wrote "People of the Lake" and "The Making of Mankind". Roger Lewin is also the author of the prize-winning "Bones of Contention".