On Humans

Climate. Weathers. History.

Here's an encore episode to wrap up the mini-series on these themes!

This episode on the puzzling origins of farming is one of my all-time favourites on the show. I thought it was a good time to put it out again.

You can also read my essay on the topic ⁠here⁠.

Enjoy!

~

ORIGINAL SHOW NOTES

Agriculture changed everything. Traditionally, this “Neolithic Revolution” was celebrated for opening the gates of civil...

Before they built empires, the Europeans built ports.

Across Africa and Asia, European sailors arrived as merchants. They traded and negotiated. They defended their interests—sometimes with cannon fire. But they were not trying to govern a foreign land.

Yet things changed.

Why?

Historian Tirthankar Roy has a bold new answer.

Roy is a professor at the London School of Economics, where he teaches a renowned course on the economic histor...

On Humans is back from the break!

To mark the summer heat, here is a two-part series on how climate has shaped the human story. In next week's episodes, we will explore the role of water and weather in the origins of European colonialism. But today, we start by crawling deeper into the past: to the origins of humanity itself.

In this episode, Yale professor Jessica Thompson helps us navigate one of the most influential ideas in ...

Binary thinking is out of fashion. But what about biological sex?

Whatever we might say about diversity and fluidity, the ideas of “male” and “female” seem essential in biology. I’ve taught the subject. I’ve drawn bees and flowers, with arrows from anthers to ovaries. I’ve used the terms “dad cell” and “mother cell” while doing so. I don’t know how I could have done it any differently.

And maybe that’s just fine. Human sex cells are ...

And so it ends! In the final episode of The Origins of Humankind, we explore the aftermath of the story so far—the story of how one peculiar species, Homo sapiens, evolved, spread, and outlived its relatives.

Guiding us through this final chapter is Johannes Krause once again. Together, we uncover the emerging picture of the global spread of farming, pastoralism, and other key ingredients of modernity. Along the way, we explore some...

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 understand...

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 w...

The story continues! In part 2 of the Origins of Humankind, we trace the first steps of our ancestors after they left the chimpanzee lineage.

To get humanity going, our ancestors had to wander through millions of years of what anthropologist Dean Falk has called the Botanic Age. It's a time shrouded in mist, yet it may hold the key to some of humanity’s most defining traits — from language and music to our clumsy toes and our large...

Welcome to the first episode of the Origins of Humankind!

In this sweeping pilot, we cover the entire planetary backstory of human existence – from the origins of life to the climate change that kickstarted human evolution. Our expert guide on this journey is Tim Coulson, the Head of Biology at the University of Oxford and the author of A Universal History of Us. 

The episode explores questions such as:

• What is "life”? H...

Where do we come from? How did we get here? What kind of creature are we?

The science of human origins has made great progress in answering these timeless questions. From carbon isotopes to ancient DNA extraction, we now have unprecedented tools to explore our past. But with all this detail, it’s easy to miss the forest from the trees.

To fill this gap, On Humans has partnered with CARTA — a UC San Diego-based research unit on human ...

India’s history isn’t just the story of one nation—it’s the story of one-sixth of humanity. It’s also a lens for understanding how colonialism, democracy, and globalization shaped the modern world.

This mini-series offers a human-centred perspective on that remarkable story, focusing on how politics and trade impacted the lives of ordinary Indians.

 In Part 1, we explored the decline of the Mughals and the long stretch of British ru...

Following the success of last year’s ⁠What About China ⁠-trilogy, I’m delighted to introduce a two-part series on the economic history of India. This series examines the origins of modern India by focusing on politics, poverty, and the experience of ordinary Indians from 1600 till today.

The first episode covers the decline of the Mughals and the hugely controversial rule of the British East India Company and, later, the British Cro...

Why are history books so full of men? Why have so many societies treated women as property?

In short, why is patriarchy so pervasive?

A casual thinker might find an easy answer from biology. Men tend to be bigger and stronger. Hence, they get to run the show. “Just look at chimpanzees!”

But this explanation has obvious problems. Indeed, female chimpanzees don’t have much power in their groups. But female bonobos do. And looking at h...

“We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” - Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene

In 1976, Richard Dawkins published one of the most iconic science books of all time. It has inspired a generation of science enthusiasts. But unsurprisingly, many readers disliked the idea of being but a “robot vehicle” or a “survival machine” for some tiny molecules — especially if ...

Each year, the World Happiness Report ranks countries based on their citizen's life satisfaction. My home country, Finland, tends to come at the top. Sure. But lessons can we draw from all this? Beyond patting Finns on the back, can we distil some more insights from the report?

I got to discuss this with Lara Aknin, co-editor of the World Happiness Report. In this previously unpublished clip, Aknin explains the major findings from t...

Many traditional societies accept polygyny (one man, many wives). Monogamy, too, is practised across the globe. But what about polyandry — one woman, many husbands? Is this a "dubious idea" as sometimes suggested by evolutionary theorists?

In this bonus clip, anthropologist Katie Starkweather offers interesting examples of formal and informal polyandry from around the world. She also brings nuance to theories about jealousy in men ...

Happy New Year 2025! To celebrate, here is an encore of what proved to be the most popular episode of 2024.

This rerun combines episodes 30 and 31 into one epic journey towards the frontiers of human understanding. My guest is Donald Hoffman. Our topics are consciousness, cosmos, and the meaning of life.

Enjoy!

Original show notes

Laws of physics govern the world. They explain the movements of planets, oceans, and cells in our bo...

This was fun!

Last Wednesday saw the first-ever live recording of On Humans. The event was held at the London Business School, courtesy of the LBS's China Club. My guest was MIT Professor Yasheng Huang, familiar to regular listeners from the China trilogy published earlier this fall.

In this new episode, we keep tackling the origins of modern China. This time, we draw insights from Huang's two upcoming books: Revisiting the Needham...

Persians. Romans. Chinese. Guptas. Abbasids. Mongols. British.

The list of the world’s largest empires is a list of different peoples of Eurasia. With the sole exception of ancient Egypt, the Eurasian landmass has been the breeding ground for the largest empire of each moment in history.

Why has Eurasia been so prone to large empires? Similarly, why did so many technological breakthroughs — from writing to gunpowder — occur in Eurasi...