This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

A few years ago, I heard a talk called Relatives and Ancestors by Bernard Wood.

It was so interesting and funny, I got curious to

learn more about him and his work. Wood is a medically trained paleoanthropologist and university

professor of human origins at the George Washington University. He's one of the people

other scientists turned to when they found a new fossil, and they need to figure out how it might be related to us.

That's because one of his academic specialties is reconstructing phylogeny, figuring out the relationships between living things.

He spent decades working on understanding the connections between us and everything else in the primate family tree.

So when some of you asked for sort of a refresher course in human evolution, it felt like the perfect chance to talk to him.

Human evolution. Okay. Human evolution in five minutes.

I think you could argue that one of the most important pieces of evidence about human evolution,

which has emerged in the last quarter of a century, has absolutely nothing to do with fossils.

It's to do with the fact that molecular biologists have now come up with really convincing evidence

that the apes that are most closely related to modern humans are chimpanzees and bonobos.

That, I think, is really very secure.

We share nearly 99% of our DNA with chimps and bonobos, which means we clearly share a common

ancestor with them.

Wood says most estimates are that our common ancestor lived 5 to 7 million years ago.

Human evolution is what occurred between that hypothetical common ancestor of modern humans and chimpanzees and bonobos and the present.

And so if I get asked at a party, what do I do? That's what I say.

I'm interested in what happens between that hypothetical common ancestor and modern humans.

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