Usually, I'd start an episode of Eons by telling you about the discovery of some strange fossil or setting the scene for a world-changing event like an ice age or an extinction.
But today, I want to try something a little different.
Instead of thinking about a story, I want you to stop and think about the thing I'm doing here - literally, that I'm standing here and telling you a story.
Because, the evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga - and it's worth pausing to appreciate that.
It's taken several million years to get to this moment where I can tell you about how it took several million years for us to get here.
And, yes, there are other animals alive today that communicate in sophisticated ways - like whales, elephants, and crows, to name a few.
Still, our vocal abilities as a species are pretty unique.
They're part of what makes us human.
From the anatomy of one particular bone in our throats and the proportions of our vocal tract, to the morphology of our ears, paleoanthropologists are piecing together the puzzle of when and how this adaptation arose.
And while speech itself doesn't fossilize, the fossil record of our ancestors and relatives can still give us important clues about the time when we first talked.
