We once shared the planet with Neanderthals and other human species. Some of our relatives may have had tools, language and culture. Why did we thrive while they perished? Join evolutionary biologists, geneticists and anthropologists as they share profound insights about the origin of man and retrace our singular journey from fledgling prototype to the most dominant species on Earth.
This program is part of the Big Ideas Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.
Three-time Peabody Award winner, four-time Emmy Award winner, and Dateline NBC correspondent John Hockenberry has broad experience as a journalist and commentator for more than two decades. Hockenberry is the anchor of the public radio show The Takeaway on WNYC and PRI.
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Alison Brooks is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the George Washington University and a founding member of the Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology.
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Ed Green has helped pioneer the use of advanced genetic sequencing technology to read ancient DNA extracted from fossilized bones. In 2010, he and large collaboration of other scientists announced that they had used 40,000-year-old bone fragments excavated in a cave in Croatia to map out the genetic code of Neanderthals, humans’ long-dead ancestral cousins.
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Chris Stringer is a distinguished paleoanthropologist and a founder of the “Out of Africa” theory, the most widely accepted model for how modern humans evolved and spread across the globe.
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E.O. Wilson is a life-long explorer of the natural world whose pioneering studies of ants have led to revolutionary insights across a wide range of fields, from evolution to animal and human behavior.
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