"How they survive, I don't know. Where they get their food from, I have no idea. I just wish that they themselves realize that their existence and survival is an impossibility."

- David Attenborough commenting on the overwhelming presence of leeches in a New Guinea forest where pigs and humans are rare, after plucking one off his leg. BBC documentary "A Blank on the Map", 1971.



He's hilarious... but more than this, it's what he said near the end that is gonna stay with me...

After having met the Biani tribespeople for the first time, he said that the point is not about how different we are, how they have wooden pegs in their noses and "we eat bits of cow meat wrapped up in a cunning way in bits of metal. It's not the differences between us that are important, but the similarities. It's the fact that when one of us laughs, the other knows what he's feeling."