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Where, when, and how did Homo sapiens appear? What do we know about the complex set of ancestral hominins that preceded us? How recently did other hominin lineages live and what happened to them?

In this episode we talk with Kate Wong, a senior editor at Scientific American, about her latest article, The Origin of Us. Our understanding of hominin evolution over the past several million years has been transformed by exciting new fossil finds and new DNA sequence data. We talk with Kate about the biggest news, the luxuriant evolutionary bush from which our ancestors emerged in Africa, and her favorite fossil species.

Episode art: Comparison of Modern Human and Neanderthal skulls from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History via Wikimedia Commons. hairymuseummatt (original photo), DrMikeBaxter (derivative work) (CC BY-SA 2.0)"