Explore every episode of the podcast History of Hunger

In this episode of History of Hunger: How Food Made Humanity, host Lisa Rolen follows our ancient ancestors as they take one of the most significant steps in human history: leaving the safety of the trees for life on the ground. As shifting climates transformed dense forests into open savannas, early hominins faced a new challenge—finding enough food to survive in an increasingly harsh environment.

Picking up where Toumaï's story left off, we explore how our bipedal ancestors adapted to dramatic geological and environmental change by expanding their diets and embracing new ways of foraging. Discover how millions of years of resilience, adaptation, and innovation helped shape the evolutionary path that ultimately led to modern humans.

Sahelanthropus tchadensis

Travel back seven million years to the ancient forests of Chad, where the story of humanity begins. In the premiere episode of History of Hunger: How Food Made Humanity, host Lisa Rolen explores the world of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, one of our earliest known ancestors. Using fossil evidence and environmental clues, she reconstructs the landscape these early hominins called home and examines the foods that sustained them. 

Discover how the search for nourishment may have influenced the evolution of upright walking, setting our ancestors on a remarkable new path. This episode introduces the central idea of the series: that hunger—the relentless pursuit of food—has been one of the greatest forces shaping human evolution and our shared history.

What if the story of humanity could be told through the one thing we’ve always needed to survive?

Long before kingdoms, cities, or even modern humans, there was hunger. For more than 7 million years, the search for food shaped our bodies, grew our brains, inspired our tools, transformed our landscapes, and laid the foundations for civilization.

In this trailer, discover how the pursuit of our next meal may have driven our earliest ancestors to walk upright, leave the forests for the savanna, create tools, hunt, gather, and eventually harness fire. Follow that journey through the rise of agriculture, the transformation of wild plants into crops, and the emergence of the world’s first civilizations in Mesopotamia.

The History of Hunger: How Food Made Humanity explores these questions through anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, and history—revealing the remarkable ways hunger shaped who we became.

Because to understand humanity’s oldest driving force is to understand how we became human.

Follow the hunger. Discover the history.