Episode 24: Ancestor
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 31 August 2017
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Just recently, the news media announced the discovery of a 13 million-year-old fossil ape called Alesi. This remarkable fossil was found in Kenya, and it's from a time period where there's a big blank spot in the fossil record of our family tree. Alesi tells us something new about the very early evolution of apes and even shows what the common ancestor of humans and all the other living apes might have looked like. In this episode, Isaiah Nengo tells the story behind the discovery.
Special thanks to Isaiah Nengo of the Stony Brook University affiliated Turkana Basin Institute and De Anza College. And Ellen Miller of Wake Forest University.
The Leakey Foundation
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 with a tax-deductible donation.
Links
Click here to see photos of the discovery, along with a 3D animation of the inside of the fossil.
New 13 million-year-old infant fossil ape skull sheds light on ape evolution
Questions and answers about Alesi
Skull secrets of an ancient ape
Research article in Nature: New infant cranium from the African Miocene sheds light on ape evolution
Credits
Produced by: Meredith Johnson and Shuka Kalantari
Editor: Julia Barton
Sound Design: Katie McMurran
Theme Music: Henry Nagle
Intern: Yuka Oiwa
Additional Music: Tech Toys by Lee Rosevere
Sponsors
This season of Origin Stories is made possible by support from Dixon Long.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:13.6 | In this second season, we're asking some of the big questions about how we became human. |
| 0:18.9 | Who were our earliest ancestors? |
| 0:22.7 | How did we spread across the earth? |
| 0:25.2 | Why do we use tools, make art, |
| 0:28.2 | and behave in other ways that are pretty unique in the animal kingdom? |
| 0:30.5 | We're profiling some of the scientists whose work has helped shed a light on some of the answers to these questions. |
| 0:34.4 | And behind every hypothesis or big discovery, |
| 0:40.3 | there are years of painstaking research. Scientists say they've discovered a 13 million-year-old fossilized apes skull that may answer questions about humankind's evolution. |
| 0:51.3 | But scientists who discovered this well-preserved infant ape school say it's a new |
| 0:55.7 | piece of our evolutionary puzzle. |
| 1:01.0 | Just recently, news media announced the discovery of a fossil called Alessi, found in Kenya. |
| 1:08.1 | The journal Nature published The Find, which is from a time period where there's a big |
| 1:12.3 | blank spot in the fossil record of our family tree. It tells us something new about the very |
| 1:18.4 | early evolution of apes and even shows what the common ancestor of us and all the other living |
| 1:24.3 | apes might have looked like. Alessi is a big deal. |
| 1:30.1 | I remember I was sitting there and excavating. |
| 1:33.6 | Nobody was speaking in total silence, in total rupture. |
| 1:39.1 | And you just, like, it's real. |
| 1:42.0 | That's Isaiah Nango, a primate paleontologist, Leakey Foundation grantee, |
| 1:47.1 | and the lead researcher on the Alessi Discovery. |
| 1:50.4 | Nengo had been looking for something big in a remote area of Kenya, |
... |
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