On Humans25 Mar 2025

The Big Picture: From the Origin of Life to the Rise of Humans ~ Tim Coulson

Welcome to the first episode of the Origins of Humankind!

In this sweeping pilot, we cover the entire planetary backstory of human existence – from the origins of life to the climate change that kickstarted human evolution. Our expert guide on this journey is Tim Coulson, the Head of Biology at the University of Oxford and the author of A Universal History of Us.

The episode explores questions such as:

What is "life”? How did it begin?
The surprising role of meteors (even before dinosaurs)
Why animals?
“Ediacaran Garden” and the dawn of predators
Blood, bones, and the dawn of “terrestrial fish” (yup, that’s us!)
Our ancestors amongst the dinosaurs
Fruits and snakes in primate evolution
The climate change that made humanity
The rise and spread of humans

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

Tim Coulson’s book: ⁠A Universal History of Us⁠

KEYWORDS

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