On Humans

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...

Why do wars begin? How can we avoid them? Do countries wage wars whenever it suits their own goals? Or are wars a product of failed understanding and military madmen? 

These are questions at the centre of the study of war and peace. But for too long, the field of international relations has answered them by scavenging data from European history alone.   To better understand the human capacity for peace, we need to understand militar...

Our ancestors did not wage war. Warfare emerged only when humans started settling down and storing food. Indeed, some modern hunter-gatherers still enjoy the peaceful existence that once was the natural state of our species.

Or so argued Douglas P. Fry, my guest in episode 8. I found many of his arguments convincing. For example, ancient cave art is surprisingly void of depictions of warfare. You can hear many more of his arguments ...

Daron Acemoglu has been awarded the 2024 Nobel-prize for Economic Science. This is a great testament to his impressive career. But the award was given for his early work on global inequality, together with Johnson and Robinson. The Swedish Riksbank did not pay attention to his new work on inequality within rich countries. Should we? And is his new theory even consistent with the old?

I got to ask this from Acemoglu during our 2023 ...

You are given 20 dollars in cash. You can use it as you wish, but with one condition: you have to use it to treat yourself.

Now imagine getting another 20 dollars next week. This time, the rules have changed: you must use the money to treat someone else. 

Which do you think will make you feel better?

Contrary to many people's predictions, we tend to feel much better after spending the money on others. Whether we act it out or not, it ...