This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

I want to say hi and welcome to all of our new listeners.

This week, we're re-releasing one of our favorite stories from the archive.

It's a great introduction to the podcast, and I hope you like it.

We'll have new stories coming out soon.

Before we get started with the show, I'd like to invite you to join the Leaky Foundation

and the Chicago Council on Science and Technology for a lecture in Chicago on Wednesday, August 17th,

at the Harold Washington Library Center. It's called The Secret Lives of Female Chimpanzees,

and it's going to be amazing. You can learn more and get tickets at leakyfoundation.org

or on eventbrite.com.

On the western edge of Tanzania, along the shores of Lake Tanganyika,

there's a community where every waking moment of life is tracked and recorded.

For the last 55 years, this community has records for every meal eaten,

every mile traveled, every social interaction. It's all observed and

written down in meticulous detail. Emily Bame is a PhD candidate at Duke University, and she's

one of the observers there. You wake up before sunrise and wait for them to wake up. The sun

starts to come up and you're waiting to hear those first rustles from the trees

and also a great time to collect urine and fecal samples because you know that's the first thing they're going to do.

They come down, you kind of hope that maybe they'll hang out there for a little while and feed

so you can get at least a little bit of data before they start moving, but oftentimes they're really right off the mark. They'll take off,

and that's when we're crawling on hands and knees through vines and thorns, and it's a lot of

...