Origin Stories

Why do people risk their own lives to save a stranger? Why do we share food or give money to charity? The human capacity for altruism has been a puzzle for scientists since Darwin. In this episode of Origin Stories, primatologist Joan Silk explores the evolution of altruism and cooperation.

In our Being Human Bonus segment, we share a story of human kindness from Erika Lantz and WBUR's Kind World.

Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. You can support this show and the science we talk about by making a tax-deductible donation. Your donation will be doubled thanks to an anonymous altruistic sponsor! Give today at www.leakeyfoundation.org/donate

Links

Learn more about Joan Silk and her research at www.joansilk.com.

Being Human www.beinghuman.org

Kind World www.wbur.org/kindworld

Adept Word Management www.adeptwordmanagement.com

Credits

Produced by Meredith Johnson

Edited by Julia Barton

Theme music by Henry Nagle

Production help from Susan Valot

Additional music by Podington Bear, Lee Rosevere, and Alex Fitch

Every animal that lives in groups has to make decisions as a group. Even a seemingly simple decision like "where should we go for dinner?" can be complicated to negotiate. Is there a simple rule behind how humans and other animals make group decisions? Margaret Crofoot is a primatologist and Leakey Foundation grantee whose research on baboons suggests there is a rule, and it's not what you might think. You can read more about Margaret Crofoot's research and see a video of her GPS data on our blog! Links Margaret Crofoot's Lab Shared decision-making drives collective movement in wild baboons Sponsors Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. You can support this podcast and the research we talk about by making a tax-deductible donation. All donations will be doubled! This episode is part of the Being Human initiative. A joint project of the Baumann Foundation and The Leakey Foundation dedicated to understanding modern life from an evolutionary perspective. Thanks to Adept Word Management for their transcription service. Visit Adept Word Management for your transcription needs. You can download transcripts of our episodes at leakeyfoundation.org/originstories Credits Produced by Meredith Johnson, edited by Julia Barton. Theme music by Henry Nagle. Additional music from: Tech Toys by Lee Rosevere Grand Caravan by Blue Dot Sessions Stars are Out by Podington Bear Creative Commons music license CC-BY-NC 3.0

Humans have evolved very differently from other primates. Is there one thing responsible for humans becoming human? Some evolutionary biologists think that the way we process our food, namely cooking it, could explain why our species developed so differently from others. Did cooking make us human? Dr. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University and Dr. Rachel Carmody of UCSF and Harvard discuss the impact that cooked food has had on human evolution.

This episode of Origin Stories was produced by Briana Breen and edited by Audrey Quinn. Music by Henry Nagle.

Thanks to Richard Wrangham and Rachel Carmody for sharing their work.

Being Human

This re-released episode includes a new Being Human bonus segment. Being Human was a joint initiative of The Baumann Foundation and The Leakey Foundation, dedicated to understanding modern life from an evolutionary perspective.

Special thanks to Lily Mazzarella of Farmacopia for talking with us about her work for the Being Human segment.

Episode Links

Richard Wrangham's Harvard University Website

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Smithsonian Magazine "Why Fire Made Us Human"

Rachel Carmody's Nature article: Diet rapidly and reproducibly alters the human gut microbiome

The Leakey Foundation

Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to human origins research and outreach. Learn more at leakeyfoundation.org.

The Power Paradox

What is power? Where does social power come from? What happens in our bodies and with our behavior when we have power and when we don't? What can we learn about lasting social power from small-scale hunter-gatherer societies?

Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the faculty director of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center. A renowned expert in the biological and evolutionary origins of human emotion, Dr. Keltner studies the science of compassion, awe, love, and beauty, and how emotions shape our moral intuition. His research interests also span issues of power, status, inequality, and social class. He is the author of the best-selling book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and of The Compassionate Instinct.

Dr. Keltner's most recent book is The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence.

This episode is a live recording from The Leakey Foundation's Bay Area Science Festival event.

Links

The Greater Good Science Center

The Leakey Foundation

Adept Word Management

Humans and our recent ancestors have been accomplished endurance runners for more than a million years. Our evolutionary history as runners partly accounts for why aerobic exercise is such a key component of human health.

In this talk, recorded in July 2016, Daniel Lieberman explores how and why the human body evolved to run long distances.

Daniel Lieberman is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard University. He is a member of the Scientific Executive Committee of The Leakey Foundation.

His research is on how and why the human body is the way it is, with particular foci on the origins of bipedalism, how humans became endurance runners, and the evolution of the highly unusual human head. Lieberman has published 3 books and more than 100 articles. His latest books are The Evolution of the Human Head, and The Story of the Human Body.

Links:

Get tickets for "The Power Paradox" with Dacher Keltner.

Donate to The Leakey Foundation. Your donation will be doubled!

Transcripts are provided by Adept Word Management.

Theme music by Henry Nagle. Closing credit song by Lee Rosevere.

Empathy has long been considered a uniquely human trait, but it's an ability that has also been observed in apes and other animals. Primatologist Frans de Waal says that examples of empathy in non-human primates and other mammals suggest that empathy has a long evolutionary history in humans. Frans de Waal is the C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory University where he directs the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution. He's the author of several books including The Age of Empathy, and most recently, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Credits: Nancy Rosenbaum produced our story. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Theme music by Henry Nagle. Additional music by Podington Bear, Lee Rosevere, and Box Cat Records. Being Human Bonus produced by Meredith Johnson. Being Human: This episode was produced as part of the Being Human initiative. A joint project of The Leakey Foundation and the Baumann Foundation. The Being Human initiative is all about why we experience our lives the way we do, including our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Keep listening after our story for the "Being Human Bonus Segment" where we talk about how the science in this episode applies to real world situations. Our guest is Natalee Hanson, a special education teacher who works with students who have emotional and behavioral disabilities. The Leakey Foundation: Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. The Leakey Foundation advances human origins research and offers educational opportunities to cultivate a deeper, collective understanding of what it means to be human. We give research grants to scientists and share their groundbreaking discoveries through our podcast, website, and lecture programs. We also give scholarships to students from developing countries to attend field schools and earn advanced degrees. You can help The Leakey Foundation fund important scientific research and outreach programs like this podcast by making a tax-deductible donation to The Leakey Foundation. Visit leakeyfoundation.org/donate before August 31st and your donation will be doubled! Adept Word Management: Origin Stories is sponsored by Adept Word Management. Intelligent transcripts. Visit them for all of your transcription needs at adeptwordmanagement.com. You can find transcripts of our past episodes at leakeyfoundation.org.

Every day for 55 years a dedicated group of researchers, students, and field assistants have spent their days crawling through thorns and vines as they follow chimpanzees to observe their behavior. They write everything down in notes and on maps and checksheets.

This episode continues the story of Jane Goodall's pioneering Gombe chimpanzee research study.

Thanks to Anne Pusey, director of the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center at Duke University, and to Emily Boehm, Joseph Feldblum and Kara Walker from Duke University.

Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. The Leakey Foundation is proud to support ongoing research at Gombe and around the world. Since 1968, we've awarded over 35 research grants to Jane Goodall and other scientists studying chimpanzees at Gombe. Learn more and help support science at leakeyfoundation.org!

CREDITS:

Produced by Meredith Johnson. Our editor is Audrey Quinn.

Music in this episode is by Henry Nagle, Lee Rosevere, and Kevin MacLeod ("Backed Vibes" Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0).

Transcripts are provided by Adept Word Management.

Humans are very verbal compared to other animals. We talk constantly, and our voices can signal many things beyond the meaning of our words. The human voice is also highly differentiated between the sexes. In this live recording of our Being Human event in February 2016, Dr. David Puts explores how studying the human voice can be a good way to gain insight into human sexual selection. Dr. Puts is an associate professor in the department of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the evolution and development of human sexuality and sex differences. He's especially interested in how sex hormones influence our psychology, behavior, and anatomy—and how these traits were shaped by sexual selection. About Being Human Being Human mixes short talks from great minds with fun hands-on experiments, drinks, conversation, and storytelling. Each month we explore different aspects of our evolution, our behavior, and the human experience. Join us on July 28th for "Born and Evolved to Run" and learn about the evolution of our remarkable ability for long-distance running. Our speaker will be Dr. Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University. Tickets are $10 and are available at Ticketfly.com. Being Human is a joint initiative of The Leakey Foundation and the Baumann Foundation. Learn More Puts Lab at Pennsylvania State University Sponsors The Being Human initiative of The Leakey Foundation and the Baumann Foundation. Dedicated to understanding modern life from an evolutionary perspective. The Leakey Foundation Adept Word Management

People have been fascinated with Neanderthals since they were first discovered in the mid-1800s. For a long time, they have been seen as dumb, brutish cavemen. As more discoveries have been made in the past few decades, our picture of who Neanderthals were and how they lived has shifted dramatically. In this episode we talk with Shara Bailey, a Leakey Foundation grantee and professor at New York University, about our closest extinct relatives. Who were the Neanderthals? And why did they disappear?

Links

The Makers of the Protoaurignacian and implications for Neanderthal extinction

Humans mated with Neanderthals much earlier and more frequently than thought

Thank Neanderthals for your immune system

Leakeyfoundation.org/donate

Sponsored by

Adept Word Management

Credits

Edited by Audrey Quinn

Theme song by Henry Nagle

Additional music by Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions

When Kristen Hawkes first started to research the foraging habits of the Hadza hunter-gatherers, she noticed that the older women in the society were spending their time collecting food and sharing it with their grandchildren. She started to wonder if this type of contribution from grandmothers might explain why humans have such long lives. Her grandmother hypothesis suggests that grandmothering may have led to many of the things that make humans different from other great apes.

Thanks to Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah for sharing her work with us. Dr. Hawkes is a member of The Leakey Foundation's Scientific Executive Committee.

Links

Kristen Hawkes' Website

Grandmothers and the evolution of pair bonds

Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity: a review of findings and future directions

Leakeyfoundation.org

Credits

This episode was produced by Schuyler Swenson. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Scoring and mixing by Schuyler Swenson. Origin Stories theme music by Henry Nagle. Additional music by Lee Rosevere.

Sponsors

This episode was produced with support from the Being Human initiative of The Baumann Foundation and The Leakey Foundation.

Transcripts are provided by Adept Word Management.