Who are we? Where did we come from?

These aren’t flippant questions, in the least. For millennia, poets, artists, philosophers, politicians, historians, scientists, and spiritual leaders have grappled with them because their answers could hold the key to explaining the complexities of human existence.

Creating a coherent picture of our earliest relatives can be a challenging undertaking. Even with recent scientific developments and archaeological discoveries, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the evolution of the human species. Crucial pieces of the puzzle are still missing, and every new discovery—fossil or otherwise—has the potential to rewrite our understanding of our own family tree.

In 10 riveting episodes, paleoanthropologist Elen Feuerriegel takes you on an unrivaled tour of the human fossil record in search of the biological and behavioral underpinnings of our very “humanness”. Big Mysteries of Human Evolution draws on current research to highlight (and maybe even help solve) these and other enduring mysteries about our closest ancestors: how the first bipeds took their first steps, how tools gave humans a cutting edge over other species, how early social groups (and diets) were structured, and how modern humans evolved to become the dominant species on the planet.

Think of this Audible Original as On the Origin of Species—updated for the 21st century.