“In our line of work, we are constantly looking for a piece of straw in a sea of pebbles,” paleoanthropologist Dr. Louise Leakey told the crowd Wednesday at the Flint Center.

Dr. Leakey, a guest speaker at the 43rd annual 2010-2011 Celebrity Forum Series, spoke to a crowd that even she thought would be smaller, due to the first game of the World Series.

Leakey talked about the origins of humanity, and the paleoanthropological work carried out by three generations of the Leakey family, including her grandfather Louis Leakey, who spoke at one of the first Celebrity Forum series.

“It was my grandparents that set foot in Olduvai,” Leakey said. “They finally found the evidence that put Africa on the map as the place we all came from.”

Leakey brought up the game World of Warcraft and stunned the audience with the fact that the time spent playing World of Warcraft by some 12 million users equates to 6 million years. This is the same amount of time it has taken us to evolve from our quadruped form to our current bipedal state.

Leakey talked about the work her grandparents accomplished in Africa, along with work done afterward by her parents, Richard and Meave Leakey, which included finds such as the Turkana Boy by Kimoya Kimeu in 1984.

Leakey also told a story about her mother, Meave, who saw a member of their party digging hastily, to which she told them “They’re not potatoes, they’re fossils – dig slowly. Neither the speaker nor the audience could stifle a laugh at this.

After showing where we have come from, Leakey showed us where we are currently. She talked about five mass extinctions thus far, the fifth being the extinction of the dinosaurs. She went on to add that there is a sixth currently underway: Humans themselves are causing their own extinction. 

As Leakey put it, our agricultural innovations free us from the constraints to the normal conventions of population regulation. There is no longer a finite supply of food for Earth’s 6.5 billion people.

During the Q & A session, one person asked if the story about Louise being the youngest person to find the oldest hominid was true. Leakey confirmed this had indeed happened, and in 1977, attained her spot in the record books.

For more information on the work of Dr. Louise Leakey, go to http://turkanabasin.org, and for information on the Celebrity Forum speaker series and tickets, go to http://www.celebrityforum.net.