You have made it. It is day 16 of our adventurous Atlas Obscura Advent calendar.

And it's the beginning of our fourth and final theme week, what I'm calling the human experiment.

Before we get to that, I have a little Atlas Obscura experiment I want to talk about.

So I've been working on Atlas with my co-founder Josh for almost 14 years and it started as an art project and a website when we were both in our 20s and it's grown to include a big book

publishing business and international trips business events obviously this

podcast and a whole bunch of other stuff and it's grown into a pretty successful enterprise

along the way and so I am saying all of this because we are doing a small

fundraising round we've done funding rounds before,

but this time we wanted to open it up

to a larger Atlas Obscura community.

So if you are an accredited investor,

which usually means you've invested in other private businesses before,

and you want to hear more, you can reach out to me at Dylan at atlasobscura.com, and I can tell you all about the fundraising

round and the business. Okay, back to the show.

So we spent the last 15 episodes exploring space, going to the extremes of Earth to understand how life began and hanging out with our animal

co-inhabitants of planet Earth. And we have finally arrived at the strangest animals of them all.

Primates, comma, humans, comma, subspecies, podcastious.

And so the question is, is how did we begin?

Where did our story start?

It is a profoundly complicated story. We may have started multiple

times in multiple ways. But one surprising and interesting place to look is the country of Georgia in a place called Manisi.

Today we're joining producer

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