On Humans16 Apr 2025

A Human Like No Other: The Rise of Homo Sapiens ~ Johannes Krause

The time has come: This is where our story truly begins.

In Episode 4 of The Origins of Humankind, we finally turn the spotlight on Homo sapiens. Guiding us through this journey is Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a pioneer of one of the greatest scientific revolutions of our time: the science of ancient DNA. This ability to extract DNA from fossils has transformed our understanding of the human past—giving us tools to tell a genuinely global history of our species.

In this episode, we use the magic of ancient DNA to explore the world our species was born into: a weird, wild Ice Age planet teeming with other human species, from Flores Hobbits to Neanderthal Giants. We touch on big questions, such as:

How did Homo sapiens spread around the world?

Why were our ancestors so successful?
How did climate changes shape their story?
What was Palaeolithic life like?
What happened to the Neanderthals? (Be prepared for a plot twist!)

We end at the dawn of the Holocene—the warm, wet period that would give rise to farming, cities, and everything we call “history.” That’s the story we’ll tackle in the final episode of The Origins of Humankind. Stay tuned. And enjoy this episode!

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

Krause's books: ⁠A Short History of Humanity⁠; ⁠Hubris: The Rise and Fall of Humanity⁠

KEYWORDS

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