An Unusual Ape: The Deep Origins of Our Human Oddities ~ Dean Falk

The story continues! In part 2 of the Origins of Humankind, we trace the first steps of our ancestors after they left the chimpanzee lineage.

To get humanity going, our ancestors had to wander through millions of years of what anthropologist Dean Falk has called the Botanic Age. It's a time shrouded in mist, yet it may hold the key to some of humanity’s most defining traits — from language and music to our clumsy toes and our large brains.

On this walk through the mysteries of the Botanic Age, our guide is Dean Falk herself. She is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and the world's leading expert on human brain evolution. Together, we try to make sense of topics such as:

• The common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees
• Against “Man the Toolmaker”: Tool use in other apes
• The walking ape: how bipedalism shaped our ancestors
• Origins of language
• Origins of music
• Size matters, but… The early evolution of the human brain

As always, we finish with the guest’s reflections on humanity.

THE ORIGINS OF HUMANKIND

This episode is part of The Origins of Humankind series, produced in collaboration with CARTA, a research centre at UC San Diego. Together, we have prepared a five-part series that tells you the whole epic origin story of humanity, with cutting-edge science as our guide.

1 | The Big Picture: From the Origin of Life to the Rise of Humans (Tim Coulson, University of Oxford)

2 | An Unusual Ape: The Deep Origins of Our Human Oddities (Dean Falk, University of Florida)

3 | Why Humans? The New Science of the Genus Homo (Chris Stringer, Natural History Museum, London)

4 | A Human Like No Other: The Rise of Homo Sapiens (Johannes Krause, Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology)

5 | The Rest is History: From the Origins of Farming to the Dawn of Modernity (Johannes Krause, Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology)

⁠⁠OnHumans.Substack.com/Origins⁠⁠

MORE LINKS

Support the show: ⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans⁠

Free lectures on human origins: ⁠CARTA⁠

Dean Falk’s book: ⁠The Botanic Age

KEYWORDS

Anthropology | Primatology | Human evolution | Human origins | Homo Erectus | Australopithecine | Australopithecus africanus | Brain evolution | Paleoneurology | Apes | Great apes | Chimpanzees | Bonobos | Gorillas | LSA | Cognitive evolution | Cognitive archaeology | Baby slings | Motherse | Parentese | Baby talk | Putting the baby down -hypothesis | Radiator theory | Biology | Honinins | Hominoids | Palaeolithic Palaeoanthropology |