Origin Stories

One of the big questions in the study of human evolution is the question of how our ancestors spread across the world. Our species evolved in Africa and migrated around the world from there. Most people on earth today are mixed descendants of multiple migrations to different places. Somewhere in almost everyone’s family history, whether it was last year or thousands of years ago, there was someone who left the place they were born and set out into the unknown, looking for a new life somewhere else. For most of humankind’s time on this planet, we all did it the same way. We walked. Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Explorer who is on an epic ten-year journey around the world on foot, tracing the path of early human migration out of Africa. Along the way he is talking with people and sharing their stories through his writing, and through educational programs for students. His project is called the Out of Eden Walk. You can learn more at leakeyfoundation.org. The Leakey

It's not every day you see a Facebook post that changes your life, but that's exactly what happened to Leakey Foundation grantee Alia Gurtov. Gurtov was checking her Facebook feed one morning and saw a post from paleoanthropologist Lee Berger. He was looking for archaeologists who were "...skinny and preferably small. They must not be claustrophobic, they must be fit, they should have some caving experience, climbing experience would be a bonus. They must be willing to work in cramped quarters, have a good attitude and be a team player." Gurtov had never seen a job description that fit her more perfectly. A few weeks later she was in South Africa, inside a cave chamber strewn with ancient bones. The fossils she helped recover have changed the story of human evolution and added a strange new relative to our family tree. Thanks to Leakey Foundation grantees Alia Gurtov and Will Harcourt-Smith for sharing their stories. You can learn more at leakeyfoundation.org. The Leakey Foundation Origin Stories is a project

The paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey described stone tools as “fossilized human behavior.” These rocks, shaped by our human ancestors and found in archaeological sites around the world, can give us clues about how ancient people lived. Archaeologist and Leakey Foundation grantee John Shea of Stony Brook University says you can learn even more by making and using stone tools yourself.   Thanks to John Shea of Stony Brook University for sharing his work. His new book is Stone Tools in Human Evolution: Behavioral Differences among Technological Primates.   Learn more about Dr. Shea's work on his website.   The Leakey Foundation Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach. Support this show and the science we talk about with a tax-deductible donation. Thanks to a generous supporter, your donation will automatically be doubled! Links Check out the complete show notes at leakeyfoundation.org   Videos  How to make a sto

Just recently, the news media announced the discovery of a 13 million-year-old fossil ape called Alesi. This remarkable fossil was found in Kenya, and it’s from a time period where there’s a big blank spot in the fossil record of our family tree. Alesi tells us something new about the very early evolution of apes and even shows what the common ancestor of humans and all the other living apes might have looked like. In this episode, Isaiah Nengo tells the story behind the discovery. Special thanks to Isaiah Nengo of the Stony Brook University affiliated Turkana Basin Institute and De Anza College. And Ellen Miller of Wake Forest University. The Leakey Foundation Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach. Support this show and the science we talk about with a tax-deductible donation. Links Click here to see photos of the discovery, along with a 3D animation of the inside of the fossil. New 13 million-year-old infant f

Our new season of Origin Stories is coming soon! This is a sneak preview of the first episode.

Why do people risk their own lives to save a stranger? Why do we share food or give money to charity? The human capacity for altruism has been a puzzle for scientists since Darwin. In this episode of Origin Stories, primatologist Joan Silk explores the evolution of altruism and cooperation. In our Being Human Bonus segment, we share a story of human kindness from Erika Lantz and WBUR’s Kind World. Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. You can support this show and the science we talk about by making a tax-deductible donation. Your donation will be doubled thanks to an anonymous altruistic sponsor! Give today at www.leakeyfoundation.org/donate   Links Learn more about Joan Silk and her research at www.joansilk.com. Being Human www.beinghuman.org Kind World www.wbur.org/kindworld Adept Word Management www.adeptwordmanagement.com   Credits Produced by Meredith Johnson Edited by Julia Barton Theme music by Henry Nagle Production help from Susan Valot Additional music by Podington Bear, Lee Rosever

Every animal that lives in groups has to make decisions as a group. Even a seemingly simple decision like "where should we go for dinner?" can be complicated to negotiate.    Is there a simple rule behind how humans and other animals make group decisions? Margaret Crofoot is a primatologist and Leakey Foundation grantee whose research on baboons suggests there is a rule, and it's not what you might think.   You can read more about Margaret Crofoot's research and see a video of her GPS data on our blog!   Links   Margaret Crofoot's Lab   Shared decision-making drives collective movement in wild baboons   Sponsors   Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. You can support this podcast and the research we talk about by making a tax-deductible donation. All donations will be doubled!   This episode is part of the Being Human initiative. A joint project of the Baumann Foundation and The Leakey Foundation dedicated to understanding modern life from an evolutionary perspective.   Thanks to Adept Word M

Humans have evolved very differently from other primates. Is there one thing responsible for humans becoming human? Some evolutionary biologists think that the way we process our food, namely cooking it, could explain why our species developed so differently from others. Did cooking make us human? Dr. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University and Dr. Rachel Carmody of UCSF and Harvard discuss the impact that cooked food has had on human evolution. This episode of Origin Stories was produced by Briana Breen and edited by Audrey Quinn. Music by Henry Nagle. Thanks to Richard Wrangham and Rachel Carmody for sharing their work. Being Human This re-released episode includes a new Being Human bonus segment. Being Human was a joint initiative of The Baumann Foundation and The Leakey Foundation, dedicated to understanding modern life from an evolutionary perspective. Special thanks to Lily Mazzarella of Farmacopia for talking with us about her work for the Being Human segment. Episode Links Richard Wrangham's Harvard Un

The Power Paradox What is power? Where does social power come from? What happens in our bodies and with our behavior when we have power and when we don't? What can we learn about lasting social power from small-scale hunter-gatherer societies? Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the faculty director of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center. A renowned expert in the biological and evolutionary origins of human emotion, Dr. Keltner studies the science of compassion, awe, love, and beauty, and how emotions shape our moral intuition. His research interests also span issues of power, status, inequality, and social class. He is the author of the best-selling book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and of The Compassionate Instinct. Dr. Keltner's most recent book is The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. This episode is a live recording from The Leakey Foundation's Bay Area Science Festival event. Links The Greater Good Science

Humans and our recent ancestors have been accomplished endurance runners for more than a million years. Our evolutionary history as runners partly accounts for why aerobic exercise is such a key component of human health. In this talk, recorded in July 2016, Daniel Lieberman explores how and why the human body evolved to run long distances. Daniel Lieberman is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard University. He is a member of the Scientific Executive Committee of The Leakey Foundation. His research is on how and why the human body is the way it is, with particular foci on the origins of bipedalism, how humans became endurance runners, and the evolution of the highly unusual human head. Lieberman has published 3 books and more than 100 articles. His latest books are The Evolution of the Human Head, and The Story of the Human Body. Links: Get tickets for "The Power Paradox" with Dacher Keltner. Donate to

Empathy has long been considered a uniquely human trait, but it's an ability that has also been observed in apes and other animals. Primatologist Frans de Waal says that examples of empathy in non-human primates and other mammals suggest that empathy has a long evolutionary history in humans.   Frans de Waal is the C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory University where he directs the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution. He’s the author of several books including The Age of Empathy, and most recently, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?   Credits: Nancy Rosenbaum produced our story. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Theme music by Henry Nagle. Additional music by Podington Bear, Lee Rosevere, and Box Cat Records. Being Human Bonus produced by Meredith Johnson.   Being Human: This episode was produced as part of the Being Human initiative. A joint project of The Leakey Foundation and the Baumann Foundation.    The Being Human initiative is all about why we

Every day for 55 years a dedicated group of researchers, students, and field assistants have spent their days crawling through thorns and vines as they follow chimpanzees to observe their behavior. They write everything down in notes and on maps and checksheets.  This episode continues the story of Jane Goodall's pioneering Gombe chimpanzee research study. Thanks to Anne Pusey, director of the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center at Duke University, and to Emily Boehm, Joseph Feldblum and Kara Walker from Duke University. Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. The Leakey Foundation is proud to support ongoing research at Gombe and around the world. Since 1968, we've awarded over 35 research grants to Jane Goodall and other scientists studying chimpanzees at Gombe. Learn more and help support science at leakeyfoundation.org! CREDITS: Produced by Meredith Johnson. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Music in this episode is by Henry Nagle, Lee Rosevere, and Kevin MacLeod ("Backed Vibes" Licensed under 

Humans are very verbal compared to other animals. We talk constantly, and our voices can signal many things beyond the meaning of our words. The human voice is also highly differentiated between the sexes.    In this live recording of our Being Human event in February 2016, Dr. David Puts explores how studying the human voice can be a good way to gain insight into human sexual selection.   Dr. Puts is an associate professor in the department of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the evolution and development of human sexuality and sex differences. He’s especially interested in how sex hormones influence our psychology, behavior, and anatomy—and how these traits were shaped by sexual selection.   About Being Human Being Human mixes short talks from great minds with fun hands-on experiments, drinks, conversation, and storytelling. Each month we explore different aspects of our evolution, our behavior, and the human experience.   Join us on July 28th for "Born and Evolved to R

People have been fascinated with Neanderthals since they were first discovered in the mid-1800s. For a long time, they have been seen as dumb, brutish cavemen. As more discoveries have been made in the past few decades, our picture of who Neanderthals were and how they lived has shifted dramatically. In this episode we talk with Shara Bailey, a Leakey Foundation grantee and professor at New York University, about our closest extinct relatives. Who were the Neanderthals? And why did they disappear? Links The Makers of the Protoaurignacian and implications for Neanderthal extinction Humans mated with Neanderthals much earlier and more frequently than thought Thank Neanderthals for your immune system Leakeyfoundation.org/donate Sponsored by Adept Word Management Credits Edited by Audrey Quinn Theme song by Henry Nagle Additional music by Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions  

When Kristen Hawkes first started to research the foraging habits of the Hadza hunter-gatherers, she noticed that the older women in the society were spending their time collecting food and sharing it with their grandchildren. She started to wonder if this type of contribution from grandmothers might explain why humans have such long lives. Her grandmother hypothesis suggests that grandmothering may have led to many of the things that make humans different from other great apes. Thanks to Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah for sharing her work with us. Dr. Hawkes is a member of The Leakey Foundation's Scientific Executive Committee. Links Kristen Hawkes' Website Grandmothers and the evolution of pair bonds Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity: a review of findings and future directions Leakeyfoundation.org Credits This episode was produced by Schuyler Swenson. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Scoring and mixing by Schuyler Swenson. Origin Stories theme music by Henry Nagle. Additional music by

Laughter is a universal human behavior. Have you ever wondered why we laugh or what it really means when we do? Greg Bryant of UCLA studies the evolution of communication and vocal behavior, especially of spontaneous vocal expressions such as laughter. In this episode of Origin Stories he explores the origins and evolution of human laughter in a talk that was recorded live at our Being Human event series. Links: Being Human Join Team Leakey! Run a full or half-marathon and help raise money for science.   Greg Bryant http://gabryant.bol.ucla.edu http://www.gregbryant.org/Laughter_EHB2014.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/05/1524993113.abstract?sid=b503eb7d-e2ea-4c0b-9dcd-479c234f5465

In this episode we take a closer look at the evolutionary arms race between humans and the microbes that make us sick. What does each side bring to the fight? Dr. Pardis Sabeti of Harvard University is a computational biologist who uses math and computers to look into the genomes of humans and infectious microbes to see how both humans and microbes are evolving. She was named one of TIME Magazine’s People of the Year in 2014 for her role in the fight against ebola. Links Pardis Sabeti's Lab Thousand Days on Bandcamp

Tuberculosis is the world's leading cause of death by infectious disease, and it has been plaguing humanity for a very long time. In the first episode of a two-part series on infectious disease and human evolution, Dr. Anne Stone of Arizona State University investigates a mysterious case of tuberculosis in ancient Peruvian mummies and finds surprising new evidence in the search for the origins of TB. Thanks to Anne Stone for sharing her work. Her lab is on Twitter @StoneLab and online. Here's a link to Stone's Nature paper. Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. Learn more about The Leakey Foundation and help support science at leakeyfoundation.org This episode was released on World Tuberculosis Day, 2016. Learn more at stoptb.org

The bad news is that everybody has face mites. The good news is that these tiny cousins of spiders and ticks seem to be harmless for the vast majority of us.  In this episode, entomologist and evolutionary biologist Michelle Trautwein describes how she and her colleagues collected face mite DNA from a variety of volunteers for a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results of the study were surprising and further confirmed our current understanding of human migration through time. Listen as we explore the lives of these close personal friends of ours, and learn how they may help us answer new questions about our own evolution. Learn more and see photos if you dare, on The Leakey Foundation blog. Sponsors: Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. The Leakey Foundation advances human origins research and offers educational opportunities that cultivate a deeper, collective understanding of what it means to be human.  For a limited time all donations to The Leak

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focuses on how babies and young children learn about the world. She’s the author of over 100 journal articles and several books including The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosophical Baby.  This episode is part of the Being Human event series, presented by The Leakey Foundation with support from the Baumann Foundation. Thanks to Alison Gopnik for sharing her work. You can learn more about her research at alisongopnik.com. The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization that funds human origins research and outreach. Visit leakeyfoundation.org to learn more. The Being Human initiative is dedicated to understanding modern life from an evolutionary perspective. Learn more at leakeyfoundation.org/beinghuman. Music in this episode is by Henry Nagle and Lee Rosevere. Sound Engineering by Rob Byers.