Music, food, and family podcasts
Looking for a new podcast? Executive Director Sharal Camisa Smith recommends Origin Stories episodes on music, food, and family dynamics.
Lucy, the iconic ancestor
Fifty years since the discovery of Lucy, what does this iconic fossil tell us about our evolutionary story? By Evan HadinghamAuthor of Discovering Us What marked out our ancestors from other early apes and set them on the evolutionary path to becoming Homo sapiens? At the start of the 20th century, many assumed that intelligence and a big brain were
Lucy, discovered 50 years ago in Ethiopia, stood just 3.5 feet tall − but she still towers over our understanding of human origins
In 1974, on a survey in Hadar in the remote badlands of Ethiopia, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and graduate student Tom Gray found a piece of an elbow joint jutting from the dirt in a gully. It proved to be the first of 47 bones of a single individual – an early human ancestor whom Johanson nicknamed “Lucy.”
Grantee Spotlight: Stephen Magohe
Stephen Magohe is a geologist and assistant lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam who is pursuing his PhD at the University of Calgary. In 2024, Magohe received a prestigious Francis H. Brown African Scholarship for his project “Investigating early Homo habitat through geoscience at Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania.”
Underwater caves yield new clues about Sicily’s first residents
How and when did people first come to Sicily? Scientists exploring coastal and underwater caves discover clues about Sicily's first settlers.