In the rush of today's world, and with more than half of us now living in cities, the majority of people are less and less connected with the spectacle of nature.

What is it that really makes us, us? It’s our collective intelligence. It’s our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.

Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright, walking, big brained, super intelligent ape.

Its important to remember that we evolved. Now, I know thats a dirty word for some people, but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas, the chimpanzee and also the bonobos. We have a common past, and we have a common future.

With the discovery of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, my grandmother Mary Leakey pioneered the research in East Africa with my grandfather Louis. Many more spectacular fossil finds have since been made, both in Africa and elsewhere, by many researchers driven to understand our past.

When we find a fossil, we mark it. Today, we've got great technology: we have GPS. We mark it with a GPS fix, and we also take a digital photograph of the specimen, so we could essentially put it back on the surface, exactly where we found it.

In the rush of todays world, and with more than half of us now living in cities, the majority of people are less and less connected with the spectacle of nature.

If you want to become a fossil, you need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the Earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface.

If you want to become a fossil, you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface. And then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you.

What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.