Able Quote by David Pilbeam

Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The whole story is about change. We are very lucky that the earth's history is recorded in fossilized remains. And we can see the…

— Richard Leakey

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs.…

— Jared Diamond

Human paleontology shares a peculiar trait with such disparate subjects as theology and extraterrestrial biology: it contains more practitioners than objects for study.

— David Pilbeam

A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more…

— David M. Raup

Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying…

— Paul Di Filippo

“I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.”

— Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Anthropology has reached that point of development where the careful investigation of facts shakes our firm belief in the far-reaching theories that have been…

— Franz Boas

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as…

— Thomas Huxley

And it has been the paleontologist- my own breed-who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: ...We paleontologist have said that the…

— Niles Eldredge

“The places paleontologists looked for fossils and how those fossils have been interpreted have been influenced by politics and culture, reminding us that while…

— Brian Switek

We are not just studying human history, we are shaping it.

— Jason Russell