Human origins, told from the field.
Origin Stories is the Leakey Foundation podcast, built around human origins research and the people doing it. Its recent episodes move from orangutan fieldwork in Borneo to Neanderthal evidence at Shanidar Cave, endurance running, ancient DNA, and archaeological training in South Africa.
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Origin Stories is the Leakey Foundation podcast, a narrative science show about human origins and the research surrounding them. Its recent episodes range widely, but they keep circling the same deep questions. What do fossils preserve? How do great apes live? What can ancient DNA now reveal? How did movement, endurance, landscape, and survival shape human evolution? The show answers through reported stories rather than loose conversation. One recent episode remembers Biruté Mary Galdikas through orangutan fieldwork in Borneo, conservation, and discoveries made by following animals day after day. Another revisits Shanidar Cave, where older excavations and newer methods meet around Neanderthal evidence and the debated flower burial. A year-end discoveries episode brings in ape genomes, long-read sequencing, and researchers explaining why earlier genome sequences were incomplete. The episode called Can a Human Outrun a Horse? uses endurance running and persistence hunting to connect bodies, risk, and evolutionary theory. The Boomplaas Cave bonus interview adds a field-school view of archaeology as an international science shaped by questions and methods. The show often makes science tangible through place. Swamp water, cave backfill, tracks, sediments, sleeping nests, and field notes all matter. It also names the infrastructure behind discovery: grants, field permits, collaborators, producers, editors, and donor support. That makes the research feel less like a finished headline and more like work done by people under real constraints. The register is clear, warm, and explanatory. It can handle technical terms such as telomere-to-telomere genomes, breccia, and anthropological genetics, then slow down and make them understandable. Origin Stories suits a listener who wants evolutionary science with narrative shape and institutional context. It is not just a catalog of findings. Its distinguishing value is the way it places discovery inside field practice, conservation stakes, and the long patience of research.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants human evolution, archaeology, primate behavior, and genetics explained through reported stories. It also fits people who like science that stays close to fieldwork, methods, and the people doing the research.
What sets it apart: Origin Stories stands apart by tying evolutionary science to the Leakey Foundation’s research world, including grantees, field sites, preservation questions, and conservation work. The result feels more like a guided visit to active research than a general science roundup.
Explore human evolution one story at a time. This award-winning show blends storytelling with science that will change your understanding of who we are.
Goat dung in a Neanderthal cave: exactly the fieldwork detail your family-tree obsession was missing.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear, vivid portrait of field discoveries that reshaped orangutan science.
Birute Mary Galdikas's early years with orangutans come through as a set of discoveries earned the hard way: males moving across the ground, animals venturing beyond the rainforest, lives that proved more solitary than expected, and sleeping nests built high in the canopy.
A warm annual roundup makes current human-origins research feel close enough to grasp.
Origin Stories uses its annual Top Discoveries in Human Origins episode as a brisk guided tour through 2025 finds, with Meredith Johnson joined by producer Ray Pang to talk through favorite selections.
A fossil-rich South African landscape unsettles the straight-line story of human evolution.
Origin Stories and The Science Podcast use South Africa's cradle of humankind to complicate the neat, straight-line version of human evolution.
A horse race opens into a vivid, bodily look at the theory that endurance running helped make humans human.
A lightly absurd question gives the episode its hook: can a person outrun a horse? From there, it turns toward the endurance running hypothesis, using Nicole Tini's wish to race a horse on foot as a bodily test of an evolutionary idea.
Fast histories of familiar things.
The deep past, argued into the present.
Origin Stories traces Dr.
Origin Stories' annual Top Discoveries in Human Origins episode tracks 2025 papers from Leakey Foundation grantees, with Meredith Johnson and producer Ray Pang moving from Paranthropus boisei to Denisovans.
Origin Stories pairs Anne Gibbons's South African hominin overlap report with Melanie Beasley's claim that fly larvae can help explain Neanderthal nitrogen values.
Origin Stories, the Leakey Foundation podcast, follows Meredith Johnson as Nicole Tini tries to race a horse on foot to test the endurance running hypothesis.
Meredith Johnson shares the origin story of the Leakey Foundation's podcast 'Origin Stories' on its 10th anniversary, including behind-the-scenes moments and a call for support.
Emma Pomeroy identified a Neanderthal skull while sieving backfill at Shanidar Cave in 2016.
A bonus interview with Professor Justin Pargeter about the scientific research at Boomplaas Cave and its importance for understanding evolution, climate change, and human adaptability.
Celebrating Dr.
Dr.
This episode of Origin Stories explores the infamous Piltdown Man hoax, a fake missing link that fooled scientists for decades.
This episode of Origin Stories honors Louis Leakey's life and legacy as a pioneering paleoanthropologist who transformed our understanding of human evolution.