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Origin Stories is The Leakey Foundation's podcast about how we became human. Listen and explore human evolution one story at a time.

Jun 4, 2021

The widely-held idea known as the “obstetrical dilemma” is a hypothesis that explains why babies are so helpless, and why childbirth is so difficult for humans compared to other animals. 

The obstetrical dilemma suggests that babies are born early so their big brains can fit through the mother’s pelvis, which...


May 29, 2020

Have you ever considered how profoundly food has shaped who we are as a species? Julie Lesnik is a paleoanthropologist who studies the evolution of the human diet. Her special focus is on insects as food in the past, present, and future. 

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Read more about Julie Lesnik's work and check out her book...


Aug 25, 2016

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...


Aug 13, 2016

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...


Apr 29, 2016

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...