This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson, and I'm thrilled to tell you that we're back for another season of stories,

stories about how humans became the way we are.

It was a really fundamental shift in the way that we see both chimpanzees and then our place as humans in nature. It's very different from anywhere else you go. You're used to seeing monkeys in cages and people outside.

And here it's the opposite. The monkeys are outside,

and all the cages that you see are for us.

If we only talk about meat, we tend to only talk about men. So by looking at food sources

that are more variable, we start seeing more people that existed in the past.

This season, we'll hear from scientists who are tackling some of the biggest questions

about how we live and survive.

We had to develop some type of mechanism to sleep safely and soundly, because we were now

in the realm of predators that have been our natural predators for tens of millions of years, right?

And this was quite dramatic.

It's dramatic because, of course,

well, humans eating humans.

It's something that scared us,

like why we should be eating humans.

And because this year is the Leakey Foundation's 50th anniversary, we'll share treasures

from the Foundation's archive of lectures by amazing scientists like Diane Fosse and Mary Leakey.

And we'll get a cosmic perspective from Carl Sagan.

We're all the same because we're all related.

We are all evolved from a single instance of the origin of life some 4,000 million years ago.

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