A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year, we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge.

Whether or not all this came to pass in an East African ditch, I wouldn't like to say. Perhaps it happened in North Africa or further west, but Africa was definitely the place.

The land is not in the least bit fertile and yet the cattle herds grow larger and larger. A cow represents capital investment here.

We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed.

To investigate the history of man's development, the most important finds are, of course, hominid fossils.

We think that groups of between 30 and 40 early men would have settled in an area measuring a hundred square kilometers.

The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants.

A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year, we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge.

I, too, am convinced that our ancestors came from Africa.

The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels.

It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.

We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.

Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task.

Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.

Sadly, I am not able to take part in the fieldwork myself so much anymore, as both of my legs were amputated following an airplane crash twelve years ago.

Earlier, 100,000 elephants lived in Kenya and we didn't have any noteworthy problem with it. The problem that we have is not that there are now more elephants.

For fossils to thrive, certain favorable circumstances are required. First of all, of course, remnants of life have to be there. These then need to be washed over with water as soon as possible, so that the bones are covered with a layer of sediment.

One should not forget that there are very few surviving items from this period, often just single, small bones, a tooth, a sliver of the skull. Categorizing these pieces can be very difficult.

I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.

Elephants can live to an age of up to 70 or 80 years and they have a good memory. It could be they come across an area that is experiencing a drought. Then they continue on their path and run into people.

Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.

Scientific innovations continually provide us with new means of analyzing the finds.

I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils.

If I had to come up with something that just came to me, I think growing up in a small town, I want knowledge. I still think today, knowledge is one of the keys.

My mom took me to see Carnal Knowledge and The Wild Bunch and all these kind of movies when I was a kid.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.

It was very interesting for me because DNA made music without much technical knowledge at all.

But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings.

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the later ignorance.

Knowledge is the treasure of a wise man.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Effective use of Braille is as important to the blind as independent mobility, knowledge in the use of adaptive technology, and the core belief that equality, opportunity and security are truly possible for all people who are blind.

I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.

As far as knowledge goes I've come a long way.

For example, I spent a lot of time with Reagan, both before he ran for governor and when he was running for president. As a print reporter without the cameras, I was able to really test the quality of their minds and their knowledge base.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.