Hey there side-door listeners, we've got an exciting development from a previous episode.

You may have heard that one it was called,

Did Meat Make Us Human?

It was about the role that meat-eating may have played in human evolution.

In that episode, we spoke with Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Breonna Pobner.

She's one of the people in charge of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History's Hall of Human Origins.

And she studies ancient human diets for a living.

Some people even call her a dietary detective,

which just sounds really cool.

Well, she's been getting a lot of attention lately for a new discovery,

and it's about the type of meat some early humans might have eaten.

Not just any meat, human meat, kind of.

It's complicated.

So we figured who better to help uncomplicate things than Breonna herself.

We caught up with her in Kenya this past week.

Here's our conversation. I hope you enjoy.

I want to start with some definitions,

because we'll use the term early human a lot in this conversation.

But really briefly, what does that mean?

Great question. So early human, if you think of an evolutionary tree,

early humans are species that are extinct,

but they're on our branch of the tree.

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