Top Human Origins Discoveries of 2025

Top Human Origins Discoveries of 2025

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Origin Stories x The Science Podcast

This episode features two stories from the Science Podcast. First, Science writer Ann Gibbons tells the story of three ancient hominin species that lived side-by-side in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind. Then, anthropologist Melanie Beasley discusses her new study on why chemic ...  Show more

Can a Human Outrun a Horse?

This is a story about sweat, survival, speed, and the peculiar ways running may have shaped us as humans. Armed with a hydration vest, a dream, and paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman's endurance running hypothesis, filmmaker Nicole Teeny set out to push the limits of her own en ...  Show more

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The Last Neanderthals
The Ancients

For hundreds of thousands of years Neanderthals have roamed the lands of what is today Europe and western Asia. But how did they survive, and what caused their decline?


Tristan Hughes delves into the fate of the last Neanderthals and continues our Ice Age mini-series ...

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Where to meet a Neanderthal
Unexplainable

We know Neanderthals and early modern humans coupled up. But when did they meet, exactly? And where? Some fossilized smoke and a baby tooth might hold clues. Guest: Adam Cole of HowTown For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And p ...  Show more

Trenton W. Holliday, "Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe" (Columbia UP, 2023)
New Books in Anthropology

During the Last Ice Age, Europe was a cold, dry place teeming with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, bison, cave bears, cave hyenas, and cave lions. It was also the home of people physically indistinguishable from humans today, commonly known as the Cro-Magnons. Our knowle ...  Show more

The Life Scientific: Tori Herridge
Discovery

Elephants are the largest living land mammal and today our planet is home to three species: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant.But a hundred thousand years ago, in the chilly depths of the Ice Age, multiple species of elephant roamed th ...  Show more