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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
I lost my legs, but the way you look at it is, "What happened if the legs had lost me?" I buried the legs rather than myself, and so that's a good thing. Walking on artificial legs isn't the best way to get around, but there are advantages. People go out of their way to help you. You get wheelchairs through long queues, and lines at customs and immigration. If the seat's too small in an airline, you can take your legs off and fit in very comfortably. So there are a number of positives about this, and I wouldn't by any means think it was all negative. It taught me a great deal about bipedalism, which is the fundamental of humanity. I had always lectured about the important steps in becoming a human, one of which is bipedalism. It happened six, seven million years ago probably. I never really thought about the implications of being bipedal, and to me, bipedalism is the key to the extraordinary levels of compassion that we seem to be programmed to. People don't necessarily come to that conclusion.
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