Episode 29: Rewriting Our Story
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2017
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For a long time, scientists have been searching for the first Homo sapiens in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia. The story we've been telling about the origin of our species has gone something like this: Around 200,000 years ago in East Africa, the first Homo sapiens emerged, splitting off from an ancestral species, possibly Homo erectus. We had big brains and a knack for tool making. We spread out across the world from there. We adapted, and we alone survived.
Now a scientific discovery made by Leakey Foundation grantee Jean-Jacques Hublin and colleagues has challenged the story we tell about ourselves and pushed the date of the origin of our species back by 100,000 years.
The Leakey Foundation
Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach. The Leakey Foundation funds cutting-edge research about human evolution and human behavior. Support this show and the science we talk about with a tax-deductible donation. Thanks to a generous supporter, your donation will automatically be doubled!
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Credits
Editor: Julia Barton
Host and Series Producer: Meredith Johnson
Associate Producer: Shuka Kalantari
Sound Design: Katie McMurran
Theme Music: Henry Nagle
Additional Music:
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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. |
| 0:12.4 | I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:14.9 | For a long time, scientists have been searching for the first Homo sapiens in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia. |
| 0:21.6 | And the story we've been telling about the origin of our species goes a little something like this. |
| 0:27.6 | About 200,000 years ago in Ethiopia, the first of our kind appeared. |
| 0:32.6 | We split off from an ancestral species, maybe Homo erectus. |
| 0:39.9 | We had big brains and a knack for toolmaking. |
| 0:42.2 | We spread out across the world. |
| 0:45.1 | We adapted, and we alone survived. |
| 0:51.3 | But just recently, a new scientific discovery has challenged that story we tell about ourselves. |
| 0:57.6 | For many people, fossils are just bones. but for me, these bones, they belong to people. And it's impossible not to try to imagine the life of this individual |
| 1:06.8 | or his death also in this place. |
| 1:15.4 | It's like an opening on another world. |
| 1:18.1 | This is Leakey Foundation grantee Jean-Jacques Ublanc. |
| 1:20.4 | He's the director of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
| 1:23.7 | in Leipzig, Germany. |
| 1:26.1 | And the world Ublan describes, it existed around 300,000 years ago, |
| 1:31.6 | in a cave shelter on a green hillside, west of what is now Marrakesh in Morocco. There, a group of people, |
| 1:39.9 | maybe a small family, made tools, hunted animals, and gathered together around a fire to cook and keep warm. |
| 1:47.7 | They died there, too. |
| 1:49.7 | And the traces they left behind are rewriting the story of the origin of our species, Homo sapiens. |
| 1:56.4 | The cave where those people lived is now called Jebel Erhoud. |
... |
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