Human Evolution: Dragon Man

The story of human origins is often imagined as a simple journey from Africa, but is the truth actually much messier? Tristan Hughes and leading palaeoanthropologist Prof. Chris Stringer dismantle the traditional narrative, discussing how recent breakthroughs in fossils and ancie ...  Show more

What happens when an entire city disappears? Beneath the sands and wetlands of Egypt lie the remains of forgotten cities that once stood at the heart of one of the ancient world’s greatest civilisations.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Egyptologist Chr ...  Show more

Between 1927 and 1937, paleontologists excavated fossils from about 40 members of the species that today we call Homo erectus from a site in China known as Dragon Bone Hill. And then World War II broke out and the fossils were lost. In this episode, we trace their path as far as ...  Show more

In Sussex, in 1912, men quarrying in a gravel pit near Piltdown village turned up a human skull. According to Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur archeologist with a remarkable track record for finding ancient treasures, it belonged to a palaeolithic man, possibly millions of ye ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the evolution of the human species. Where did we come from - we being Homo Sapiens? Let’s not go back to the Big Bang or in search of Genesis, but sift through the evidence from biology, palaeontology, climatology and anthropology.The story of huma ...  Show more

Today's episode is from our brilliant sibling podcast The Ancients. Cheddar Man is the oldest almost complete skeleton of a Homo sapien ever found in Britain and, for this fantastic episode ...  Show more