On Humans9 Apr 2025

Why Humans? The New Science of the Genus Homo ~ Chris Stringer

Things are about to get personal... In episode 3 of The Origins of Humankind, we zoom into the birth and spread of humanity itself.

Our guide is the iconic Chris Stringer, one of the most influential paleoanthropologists alive. Together, we trace the origins of our genus and the emergence of Homo sapiens as the last surviving human species. While doing this, we meet many oddities, such as rhino hunting along the River Thames, but we also explore some of the biggest questions in human evolution:

What is a human?
Why did we evolve big brains?
Why do we have such long childhoods?
Is Homo sapiens truly unique — or just one human among many?

As always, we finish with my 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)

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

3 | Why Humans? The New Science of the Genus Homo (Chris Stringer)

4 | A Human Like No Other: The Rise of Homo Sapiens (Johannes Krause)

5 | The Rest is History: From the Origins of Farming to the Dawn of Modernity (Johannes Krause)

⁠⁠OnHumans.Substack.com/Origins⁠⁠

MORE LINKS

Support the show: ⁠⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans⁠⁠

Free lectures on human origins: ⁠⁠CARTA⁠⁠

Stringer's books: Lone Survivors; Our Human Story

KEYWORDS

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