African Fossils May Show the Future of Climate Change Richard Leakey, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, says fossils of human ancestors found in Kenya can tell a lot about the future. Called from his seat to speak, Richard Leakey rose and seemed to keep going up, until he towered above a crowd gathered Monday evening for a swanky fund-raiser at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. He stands about 6 feet 4 inches, atop metal legs that replaced the ones he lost two decades ago, when he made it his job to hound elephant poachers in Kenya and the plane he was flying crashed under murky circumstances. He is 67 now, and his face shows years under the African sun, as a boy who dug with his parents for the fossilized remnants of human ancestors, as a conservationist and as a political reformer and raconteur. He has fractured his skull falling from a horse, had a wooden expedition boat destroyed by crocodiles, been whipped by political opponents in Kenya, and lost his kidneys to disease and patches of skin to cancer. Discoveries by his parents, and later by him and his associates, of skeletons and skulls that had rested in the ground for millions of years, have shaped the modern understanding of human evolution. Having read the past, Mr. Leakey offered a few blunt words Monday about a future that would be warmer and wetter. "I was wondering," he said from the podium, in a dining room built over the Hudson, "how many dinners you will be able to have at Pier 60 before it went underwater." Mr. Leakey, a tenured professor at the State University at Stony Brook, spends most of the year in Africa, where he has been building the Turkana Basin Institute in eastern Kenya. In conversation, he said the discoveries of origin hunters, or paleoanthropologists, like his wife, Meave, and his parents Louis and Mary Leakey, offered profound lessons for modern human life. "The link between the past and the future, as seen in the present, is fundamental to stewardship of the climate," Mr. Leakey said. Some have taken comfort from evidence that the climate has changed drastically before, he noted, but that misses the point of the revelations of fossil evidence. "Go to the geologic record and say, oh yes - five mass extinctions before," Mr. Leakey said. If this is to be the sixth, there's going to be a disaster. You've got five previous examples. It doesn't matter to say, oh, it's happened before. Indeed it has. We can read it. That makes you twice as scared. Mr. Leakey, whose parents famously excavated Olduvai Gorge, originally wanted no part of a life hunting for fossils. He left school at 16 and set up a business collecting specimen skeletons. Several years later, while he was traveling to Nairobi from Ethiopia, his flight had to change course because of weather and took him over Turkana Lake in eastern Kenya. He noticed sedimentary rock and speculated that it might hold the remains of ancient human ancestry. He managed to persuade National Geographic to give him a small grant for an expedition. Since then, hundreds of bones and fragments found there have revealed that humans had multiple ancestors. To understand how so much could be deduced from fossils that exist only as fractions of the original creature, Mr. Leakey offered an analogy. Imagine a full set of dishes, salad plates and meat plates and fish-course plates. Then picture them all being smashed into pieces, and trying to identify what the bits looked like before they were broken. "You have knowledge of what they look like intact," Mr. Leakey said. There is no way you could stick a piece of a Wedgewood fruit bowl onto a modern plastic thing. Then you have the rim of a piece, and from the curvature, you know this is a main-course plate, but the curvature is not enough to tell me if it had fish on it or if it was used for serving meat. Then you find another piece, and, aha, this connects with that, and it was a fish plate, as opposed to a meat plate. That's what you do with bones. Having spotted Turkana as a likely target and set in motion the harvesting of its fossil riches, Mr. Leakey moved on to other public lives. Most recently, he has raised money for an institute that will be a base for exploration of the region. With help from the musician Paul Simon, who gave a benefit performance, and from Rich Gelfond, the chief executive of Imax, he has raised about $2 million on this swing through New York. As for Chelsea Piers, a study done for the city in 2009 estimated that water levels in the region would rise from 7 to 12 inches by 2050. The piers will be able to hold a few decades more of dinners and hockey practices. As long as it doesn't rain too hard.