If you're enjoying this podcast, we would love to tell you about Common Descent.

Common Descent is a podcast about paleontology, evolution, and the history of life on Earth,

hosted by two paleontologists with an unending enthusiasm for the wonders of the world.

Each episode cover science news, followed by a deep dive into a main topic requested by the audience.

Recent episodes of feature topics like eels, hibernation, and fungi.

In addition to the main series, Common Descent also features side projects that explore science and pop culture,

where the host examined the science and movies or speculate on the hypothetical evolution of fictional monsters.

Listen to Common Descent on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You're standing in the mouth of a cave some 600,000 years ago.

It's the middle Pleistocene epoch. The time when mammoths roamed the northern hemisphere

and giant short-faced

hyenas proud the landscape in search of prey to drag back to their dens. And you've come to what

will someday be northern China to visit the site that will eventually give us one of the biggest mysteries

in the history of paleoanthropology.

This is Jocodion, where the bones of more than 40 Homo erectus individuals would lie

undiscovered for millennia, only to be found, then lost again, less than two decades later.

The cave walls around you are made of limestone, laid down in the oceans of the

Ordovician period some 450 million years ago. Now though, these ancient rocks are well above sea

level. They're part of what's known in English as Dragon Bone Hill. You can hear water drips slowly somewhere in front of you,

drop by drop, forming what will one day be a stalactite, preserving information about the

ancient climate in the atoms of carbon and oxygen left behind. Behind you, outside of the cave,

lies a temperate forest made up mostly of deciduous trees

...