This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

These are all early modern humans.

These are the earliest ones from the Near East,, these are cast, but the originals are about

100,000 years old. And then you have various Neanderthals from different sites up here.

But what's really interesting is if you look at Neanderthals and modern humans, even from the

same geographic area, so here's a mood.

This is Shara Bailey.

She's a professor at New York University and a Leakey Foundation grantee.

I like to call myself a dental paleoanthropologist

because I study human origins and human evolution from a dental perspective.

Is it okay if we talk about Neanderthals today?

Yes, absolutely. That's my favorite topic.

Is it really?

Yeah, of course.

Neanderthals have captured people's imaginations

since they were first discovered in the mid-1800s.

In 1856, some miners digging in a cave in the Neander Valley in Germany uncovered what

they thought were a skull and bones from a cave bear.

The bones were passed along to a local school teacher who realized they were some strange

kind of human, but what kind he had no idea.

So he passed the fossils on to an anatomist who measured and compared and said they

...