This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Ray Pang.

Right now, we're on a little summer hiatus, so this month, we're diving into the archives

to bring you one of our favorite episodes about one of our favorite relatives, Neanderthals. Enjoy.

It's been a few years since we've talked about Neanderthals on the show,

and there have been so many fascinating discoveries about them since then.

I thought it was time for another look.

Neanderthals lived for hundreds of thousands of years, across a wide swath of the world,

from what's now Israel to what's now England, and they adapted to live in all kinds of environments

and through multiple dramatic periods of intense climate change.

Early prehistoricians had little more than stones and bones to work with,

as they tried to piece together the story of the Neanderthals.

But today's researchers work in ways those early prehistoricians could never have imagined.

Increasingly advanced technology and methods like ancient DNA research, proteomics, and 3D imaging,

are giving us a whole new window into the world of the Neanderthals.

Much of that research over the past 50 years has been supported by funding from the Leakey Foundation.

Our guest today is archaeologist and author Rebecca Raggs Sykes.

Her new book, Kindred, Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art, synthesizes more than a

century of research on Neanderthals, from the first Neanderthal fossil discovered to the most

up-to-date and cutting-edge research, revealing a vivid portrait of one of our most intriguing

and misunderstood relatives.

We connected over Zoom to chat about her book.

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