Unravelling the 6-million-year-long story of where we came from is a tricky business because palaeontologists have to rely on scarce, precious fossil remains that are hard to access and even harder to find in the first place. And there's a limit to what pieces of bone and teeth can reveal about our ancestors. But, occasionally, serendipity affords us a special glimpse into our past like it did in Laetoli, Tanzania, where a nearby erupting volcano captured the footsteps millions of years ago of a group of Australopithecines. In episode 34 of the eLife Podcast we heard from University of Perugia... Get the references and the transcripts for this programme from the Naked Scientists website