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Origin Stories

The Leakey Foundation

Explore human evolution one story at a time. This award-winning show blends storytelling with science that will change your understanding of who we are.

science natural sciences

All Episodes

31:47

Episode 27: Out of Eden the Long Way

Origin Stories ·

2017/09/21

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

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39:21

Episode 26: Rising Star

Origin Stories ·

2017/09/14

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

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23:24

Episode 25: Stones and How to Use Them

Origin Stories ·

2017/09/07

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

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25:40

Episode 24: Ancestor

Origin Stories ·

2017/08/31

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

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02:44

Season 2 Preview

Origin Stories ·

2017/08/11

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

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21:30

Episode 22: Altruism

Origin Stories ·

2017/04/07

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

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20:36

Episode 21: Follow the Leader?

Origin Stories ·

2017/03/07

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

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25:23

Episode 09: Did Cooking Make Us Human? (Re-release)

Origin Stories ·

2016/12/31

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

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41:13

Episode 20: The Power Paradox - LIVE

Origin Stories ·

2016/11/08

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

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35:21

Episode 19: Being Human - Born and Evolved to Run

Origin Stories ·

2016/10/28

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

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25:40

Episode 18: Empathy

Origin Stories ·

2016/08/25

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

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17:08

Episode 04: How to Document a Society (Re-release)

Origin Stories ·

2016/08/13

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

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29:27

Episode 17: Being Human - Speaking of Sex

Origin Stories ·

2016/07/15

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

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23:21

Episode 16: Neanderthals

Origin Stories ·

2016/07/01

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

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13:28

Episode 15: The Grandmother Hypothesis

Origin Stories ·

2016/05/28

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

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39:30

Episode 14: Being Human - Why Do We Laugh?

Origin Stories ·

2016/05/18

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

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21:29

Episode 13: Evolutionary Arms Race

Origin Stories ·

2016/04/29

In this episode we take a closerlook 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

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18:07

Episode 12: The Origins of Tuberculosis

Origin Stories ·

2016/03/25

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

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19:31

Episode 11: Face Mites

Origin Stories ·

2016/02/25

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

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38:12

Episode 10: Being Human with Alison Gopnik

Origin Stories ·

2016/01/19

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

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