80 min listen
The modern human conquest of earth
The modern human conquest of earth
ratings:
Length:
76 minutes
Released:
Apr 10, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks about the rise of modern humans, from their beginning as just one population among a diverse set of human species, to the dominant and only remaining lineage of hominids in the present. His reflections are colored by paleontological findings and begin with the evolution of modern humans and their distinctive physical characteristics in Africa more than 200,000 years ago, then moving on to their breakout from the ancestral continent and the disappearance of Neanderthals. It is at this point that, 50,000 years ago, ancient DNA findings and statistical genomics shape the rest of the story, as the net of modern human expansion pushes to every corner of Eurasia, and eventually makes the leap to Oceania and the New World. Razib discusses the human phylogenetic tree, and how different populations relate to each other, but also explores the graph of relationships that illustrate how they have mixed. He also discusses the impact of the arrival of modern humans on local ecologies, as megafauna extinctions seem to correspond with the appearance of our species in Australia and the New World. Finally, he relates diverse contemporary populations to their prehistoric antecedents, outlining how the people we know today arrived at their current locations and who their ancestors were.
Released:
Apr 10, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Samo Burja on "social technology," China, and the foreign view of America: On this episode of I talk at length with , a public intellectual who focuses on the insights that history can provide to the present and future. To be frank, Samo is one of the most historically literate people I’ve ever met. This... by Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning