Origin Stories podcast year in review
Origin Stories podcast turned six years old in 2021! We produced 10 episodes and reached several important milestones this year. Here's a look back at our year in podcasting.
Help us meet our quadruple-match challenge!
Human origins research is powered by donors like you. This December, your donation to The Leakey Foundation will be quadruple-matched thanks to Jorge and Ann Leis and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.
Fossil spine suggests ancient human relative walked like us, but climbed like an ape
s ago an ancient human relative, Australopithecus sediba, lived in what is today South Africa, near a cave called Malapa that’s a part of the Cradle of Humankind. Until recently, it was not clear how much the species spent climbing in trees and walking on two legs on the ground.
Mystery solved: footprints from Site A at Laetoli, Tanzania, are from early humans, not bears
The oldest unequivocal evidence of upright walking in the human lineage are footprints discovered at Laetoli, Tanzania in 1978, by paleontologist Mary Leakey and her team. The bipedal trackways date to 3.7 million years ago. Another set of mysterious footprints was partially excavated at nearby Site A in 1976 but dismissed as possibly being made by a bear. A recent re-excavation of the Site A footprints at Laetoli and a detailed comparative analysis reveal that the footprints were made by an early human