Discovering Us
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2022
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, we talk with Evan Hadingham, senior science editor for the PBS program NOVA. His new book, Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins, highlights the thrilling fossil finds, groundbreaking primate behavior observations, and important scientific work of Leakey Foundation researchers. Want to win your own copy of the book? Take our listener survey for a chance to win one of three giveaway copies! Discovering Us is also available for sale anywhere you buy books, but when you buy it through bookshop.org, 10% of the proceeds go to support our work. Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach.
Support this show and the science we talk about. Your donations will be matched by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.
Lunch Break Science is The Leakey Foundation's web series featuring short talks and interviews with Leakey Foundation grantees. Episodes stream on the first and third Thursday of every month.
This episode was produced by Ray Pang. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Theme music by Henry Nagle. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Lee Roservere.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. |
| 0:14.0 | I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:17.0 | Our guest today is Evan Hattingham. |
| 0:19.0 | He's an award-winning science writer and senior science |
| 0:22.1 | editor for the PBS series Nova. His editorial work at Nova includes their critically acclaimed |
| 0:28.9 | specials on human evolution, such as the dawn of humanity and in search of human origins. |
| 0:35.8 | Today I'll be talking with Evan about his most recent book, |
| 0:39.2 | Discovering Us, 50 great discoveries in human origins, which he wrote as part of a Leaky |
| 0:44.3 | Foundation project to highlight 50 of the most important discoveries of the past 50 years. |
| 0:50.4 | The book is made up of short essays and beautiful photographs that show how far we've come |
| 0:56.0 | in the search to understand ourselves and our evolution. |
| 0:59.0 | Evan's also a longtime friend of the show, and I'm so excited to welcome him to origin stories. |
| 1:05.0 | Hi Evan. |
| 1:06.0 | Hey Meredith, it's a huge pleasure to be on your podcast. So how did you first get interested in human |
| 1:13.4 | evolution? That began really when I was in high school one day when our school bus pulled into the |
| 1:21.5 | village of Avebury in southern England, which if you know it, is this quaint medieval village |
| 1:27.4 | that sits right inside Europe's biggest |
| 1:30.7 | standing stone circle from the Neolithic dating back 4,000 years. |
| 1:35.8 | And it's an utterly mysterious place. |
| 1:38.1 | To me, it's always been more mysterious and evocative than Stonehenge. |
| 1:42.0 | And that was it. |
| 1:42.8 | That was the exact moment that triggered off a lifelong |
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