What Should We Eat? Evolution, Diet, and Health
What does evolutionary science tell us about what we should eat? In this episode, Harvard paleoanthropologist and author Daniel Lieberman jo...
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Science & Medicine
Origin Stories
Origin Stories is The Leakey Foundation's podcast about how we became human.
Episodes
20 of 94 episodes
The Not So Naked Ape: The Origins of Clothing
Humans are the only animals that get dressed every day. Clothing is one of our most important inventions, yet we rarely even think about it...
Biruté Mary Galdikas - A Life Among Orangutans
Biruté Mary Galdikas passed away on March 24, 2026, at the age of 79. She spent more than 50 years studying orangutans in Borneo and fightin...
Top Human Origins Discoveries of 2025
2025 was another exciting year in human origins research! In this episode, four scientists and Leakey Foundation grantees (and one podcast h...
Origin Stories x The Science Podcast
This episode features two stories from the Science Podcast. First, Science writer Ann Gibbons tells the story of three ancient hominin speci...
Can a Human Outrun a Horse?
This is a story about sweat, survival, speed, and the peculiar ways running may have shaped us as humans. Armed with a hydration vest, a dre...
The Origin Story of Origin Stories - 10th Anniversary
After 10 years of exploring the stories behind breakthrough science, it's time to tell our own origin story! In this special anniversary epi...
The Shanidar Cave Neanderthals
Shanidar Cave is a unique archaeological site in Kurdistan where scientists found the remains of 10 Neanderthal men, women, and children. So...
Top Human Origins Discoveries of 2024
2024 was another amazing year in human origins research. In this episode, three Leakey Foundation grantees (and one podcast host) share thei...
Lucy
In this episode, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of Lucy, one of the most iconic and important scientific discoveries eve...
Ape Medicine
Are humans the only animals that practice medicine? In this episode, two scientists share surprising observations of orangutans and chimpanz...
The First Story
Over 50,000 years ago on what is now the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, someone climbed a towering rock formation and painted a mysterious i...
Understanding Neanderthals
Early prehistorians had little more than stones and bones to work with as they tried to piece together the story of the Neanderthals, but to...
The Story of Human Hair
Why do humans have most of our hair on our heads, not our bodies? Why do we have so many varieties of hair color, thickness, and curliness?...
The Musical Ape
Music is universal in all human cultures, but why? What gives us the ability to hear sound as music? Are we the only musical species–or was...
Custodian of the Ancestors
What is it like to be responsible for the safekeeping of the ancestors of everyone in the world? In this episode, we travel to the National...
A Brief History of Bling
Travel through 50,000 years of human history following clues hidden inside beads made from ostrich eggshells. In this episode, researchers J...
Top Human Origins Discoveries of 2023
2023 was another exciting year in human origins research! Fossil discoveries and long-term primate studies expanded our understanding of wha...
Siblings
Sibling relationships can include everything from love and support–to tension, competition, and conflict. They might also play a fundamental...
Fatherhood
Humans invest enormous amounts of time and energy into bringing up our babies. This unique investment is a fundamental part of what it means...