Professor Agustín Fuentes, the Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "What makes us human? The construction of the human niche and the capacity for belief". It is the second lecture in the series 'Why We Believe: evolution, making meaning, and the development of human natures'.

The first unequivocal members of the human line emerge from the cluster of human-like lineages about 2 million years ago. We call them the genus Homo. Rapidly they set off on a course that altered their bodies, minds, and the planet. One that is still underway. Over the past two million years the human lineage developed a suite of distinctive characteristics that are central to contemporary human capacities and lifeways. This lecture, drawing on the evidence from bones, stones, biologies and ecologies, illustrates the emergence of humanity’s niche, our natures, via distinctive patterns of eating, caring, moving and creatively manipulating the world around us.