Origin Stories

Laughter is a universal human behavior. Have you ever wondered why we laugh or what it really means when we do? Greg Bryant of UCLA studies the evolution of communication and vocal behavior, especially of spontaneous vocal expressions such as laughter. In this episode of Origin Stories he explores the origins and evolution of human laughter in a talk that was recorded live at our Being Human event series.

Links:

Being Human

Join Team Leakey! Run a full or half-marathon and help raise money for science.

Greg Bryant

http://gabryant.bol.ucla.edu

http://www.gregbryant.org/Laughter_EHB2014.pdf

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/05/1524993113.abstract?sid=b503eb7d-e2ea-4c0b-9dcd-479c234f5465

In this episode we take a closer look at the evolutionary arms race between humans and the microbes that make us sick. What does each side bring to the fight? Dr. Pardis Sabeti of Harvard University is a computational biologist who uses math and computers to look into the genomes of humans and infectious microbes to see how both humans and microbes are evolving. She was named one of TIME Magazine's People of the Year in 2014 for her role in the fight against ebola.

Links

Pardis Sabeti's Lab

Thousand Days on Bandcamp

Tuberculosis is the world's leading cause of death by infectious disease, and it has been plaguing humanity for a very long time. In the first episode of a two-part series on infectious disease and human evolution, Dr. Anne Stone of Arizona State University investigates a mysterious case of tuberculosis in ancient Peruvian mummies and finds surprising new evidence in the search for the origins of TB.

Thanks to Anne Stone for sharing her work. Her lab is on Twitter @StoneLab and online.

Here's a link to Stone's Nature paper.

Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. Learn more about The Leakey Foundation and help support science at leakeyfoundation.org

This episode was released on World Tuberculosis Day, 2016. Learn more at stoptb.org

The bad news is that everybody has face mites. The good news is that these tiny cousins of spiders and ticks seem to be harmless for the vast majority of us.

In this episode, entomologist and evolutionary biologist Michelle Trautwein describes how she and her colleagues collected face mite DNA from a variety of volunteers for a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results of the study were surprising and further confirmed our current understanding of human migration through time.

Listen as we explore the lives of these close personal friends of ours, and learn how they may help us answer new questions about our own evolution.

Learn more and see photos if you dare, on The Leakey Foundation blog.

Sponsors:

Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. The Leakey Foundation advances human origins research and offers educational opportunities that cultivate a deeper, collective understanding of what it means to be human.

For a limited time all donations to The Leakey Foundation will be matched by an anonymous donor. Give today at Leakeyfoundation.org/donate.

Transcripts are provided by Adept Word Management.

Links:

Global divergence of the human follicle mite Demodex folliculorum: Persistent associations between host ancestry and mite lineages

Origin of Clothing Lice Indicates Early Clothing Use by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focuses on how babies and young children learn about the world. She’s the author of over 100 journal articles and several books including The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosophical Baby.

This episode is part of the Being Human event series, presented by The Leakey Foundation with support from the Baumann Foundation.

Thanks to Alison Gopnik for sharing her work. You can learn more about her research at alisongopnik.com.

The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization that funds human origins research and outreach. Visit leakeyfoundation.org to learn more.

The Being Human initiative is dedicated to understanding modern life from an evolutionary perspective. Learn more at leakeyfoundation.org/beinghuman.

Music in this episode is by Henry Nagle and Lee Rosevere.

Sound Engineering by Rob Byers.

We 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.

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

This episode of Origin Stories was recorded live in San Francisco as part of the Bay Area Science Festival. It was the first of The Leakey Foundation and the Baumann Foundation’s new “Being Human” event series. Our speaker was Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. He gave a fascinating and funny talk about human behavior and the ways we are the same as, and different from, other animals.

You can hear more from Dr. Sapolsky on the Inquiring Minds podcast. Host Indre Viskontas interviewed Sapolsky about his work and his thoughts on our prospects as a species. You can find Inquiring Minds on iTunes and at motherjones.com/inquiringminds

This episode is part of the Being Human initiative of The Leakey Foundation and the Baumann Foundation. leakeyfoundation.org/beinghuman

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin used a sketch of a tree of life to help describe his theory of evolution. In this metaphor, the branches of the tree represent the relationships between all living and extinct creatures. Humans, like all living creatures, are on the surface of the tree, and all extinct creatures are within the tree.

In this episode we talk with Dr. Bernard Wood who studies our part of the tree of life. Wood tells us how scientists figure out which fossil creatures are our ancestors and which were just our close relatives.

Links:

Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction

Bernard Wood

Sideways Look - Bernard Wood's blog for the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.

The Leakey Foundation

Sponsor:

Adept Word Management

For over 35 years Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth have been studying wild African primates in order to better understand the evolution of the human mind. In this episode they tell us about their long-term study of free-ranging baboons in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Kinship and rank are tremendously important to these baboons. However, in this sophisticated society there seems to be a certain attentiveness, perhaps an obsession with other individuals’ relationships. Is this similar to how humans create social bonds and alliances, and does personality play a part in the ability of these baboons to survive? Listen and learn how these field researchers have approached these and other questions about how natural selection shapes the primate mind.

Links

Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney's website

Baboon Metaphysics

Being Human

Million Dollar Challenge

Adept Word Management

Have you ever wondered what it's like to make a major fossil discovery? Arizona State University graduate student Chalachew Seyoum and professor Kaye Reed tell us their exciting story.

Seyoum was working as part of a team co-directed by Reed. While searching for hominid fossils at a site called Ledi-Geraru in the Afar region of Ethiopia, he found a fossil jaw sticking out of the 2.8 million year old sediment. That jaw turned out to be the earliest known fossil from our genus Homo. It was around 400,000 years older than any Homo fossil found before. The discovery was published in the journal Science in March of 2015. Dr. Susan Anton from New York University tells us why this find and the time period it's from are important in helping us connect the dots in our picture of early human evolution.

Links:

Early Homo at 2.8 MA from Ledi-Geraru, Afar, Ethiopia : Science

'First Human' discovered in Ethiopia : BBC News

Jawbone fossil fills a gap in early human evolution : New York Times

Credits:

This show is a project of The Leakey Foundation. The Leakey Foundation funds human origins research and shares that information with the public. You can learn more and help support science at leakeyfoundation.org.

This episode was produced by Schuyler Swenson. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Music and scoring by Henry Nagle.

Origin Stories is made possible by a grant from Wells Fargo Bank. Transcripts are provided by Adept Word Management.