The Big Picture: From the Origin of Life to the Rise of Humans ~ Tim Coulson

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”? How did it begin?
• The surprising role of meteors (even before dinosaurs)
• Why animals? 
• “Ediacaran Garden” and the dawn of predators
• Blood, bones, and the dawn of “terrestrial fish” (yup, that’s us!)
• Our ancestors amongst the dinosaurs
• Fruits and snakes in primate evolution
• The climate change that made humanity 
• The rise and spread of humans 

As always, we finish with the guest’s reflections on humanity.

MORE LINKS

• More stuff: OnHumans.Substack.com/Origins

• Support the show: Patreon.com/OnHumans

• Free lectures on human origins: CARTA

• Tim Coulson’s book: A Universal History of Us

NEXT EPISODE

#2 An Unusual Ape (Tuesday 2nd of April)

In episode two, we follow the first steps on the human line, exploring how abandoning life in the trees paved the way for many of our human oddities.

Key questions: Why was upright posture so important? What did it do to parents and children? When did the brains of our ancestors start to show human oddities?

Your guide: Dean Falk, a leading expert on brain evolution at the University of Florida. She recently published a book titled A Botanic Age, looking at human evolution before the Stone Age.

Stay tuned. And subscribe to On Humans.

KEYWORDS

Evolution | Human evolution | Human origins | Origin of life | Emergence of life | Abiogenesis | Natural history | History of life | Meteors | Organic chemistry | Vertebrate evolution | Tetrapods | Dinosaurs | Pleistocene | Predators | Early humans | Austrolopithecins | Lucy | Homo erectus | Homo ergaster | Homo sapiens | Megafauna extinction | Humanity | Carl Sagan | Ediacaran Garden | Cambrian Explosion | Mesozoic | Jurassic | Triassic | Cretaceous | The Great Oxigenation Event | Sauropsids | Synapsids |