On Humans

How Do Humans Fit into the Story of Life? ~ Jonathan Loh

“What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction!” — Blaise Pascal. No moment in my teaching career has left a deeper impr

Beyond Paleo: A Culinary History of Humanity ~ Daniel Lieberman

“What do you think of the paleo diet?” To my surprise, this has become the most common question I get after telling people that I cover human evolution. I’ve long strug

When Did Globalisation Really Begin? ~ Valerie Hansen

We can decide to stay home, but even then, the wider world is always close to our skin. From global trade to ideas that travel across continents, the wider world is alway

The Why of War and the How of Peace, Part II: Lessons from Prehistory ~ Douglas P. Fry

How old is war? Does it stretch deep into human origins, or did warfare become common only as growing populations settled down?  In Part II of this conversation with Dou

The Why of War and the How of Peace, Part I: Lessons from the Modern World ~ Douglas P. Fry

History is full of wars. Why? Is war driven by fear? Greed? Revenge? Ambitious leaders? Is it rooted deep in human nature—or does it emerge only under particular social c

The Big Picture: Measuring the Origins of the Modern World ~ Bishnupriya Gupta & Stephen Broadberry (Great Divergence #5)

Was India once an affluent empire, later impoverished by British colonisation? Or was India never rich to begin with? More generally, what does historical data on wages

A View From the East: China, Japan, and the Other Paths to Prosperity ~ Debin Ma (Great Divergence #4)

The tech gap between China and the West is closing fast. But why did the land that invented paper and gunpowder ever fall behind? Debin Ma is the world’s leading econom

Why Did the Industrial Revolution Happen in Britain? ~ Robert Allen (Great Divergence #3)

Why was industrial modernity born in Europe and not, say, China? This is one of the most consequential questions about the origins of the modern world. Yet asking “why Eu

Why Did So Many Inventions Come from Europe? ~ Joel Mokyr (Great Divergence #2)

Several inventions mark the progress towards modernity - the Gutenberg printing press, the Galileo telescope, the Watt steam engine. But why was Europe the birthplace of

Why the West? Colonies, Fossil Fuels, and Lessons from China ~ Kenneth Pomeranz (Great Divergence #1)

Why did Western Europe become the richest region of the early modern world? Was the rise of the West powered by colonization, inventions, or something else entirely? And

Encore: Walking Towards the Human Condition (with Jeremy De Silva)

Something big is coming soon. Stay tuned! Whilst waiting, you can enjoy one of my all-time favourites from the archives. A lot of the recent episodes have mentioned the

Where Did Humans Evolve? Gazing at the Changing Nature of the Garden of Eden ~ Denise Su

Imagine a group of ancient humans, crafting stone tools at the dawn of humankind. What did these creatures look like?  To find out, we can stare at the skulls in museums

The Original Affluent Society? Lessons from 60-Years of "Man the Hunter" Research ~ Richard B. Lee

What was life like before farming? Was it nasty, brutish, and short? Or did our hunter-gatherer ancestors live lives that were relatively free, affluent, and ecologically

What Can Shamans Teach Us About Religion? | Many Minds with Manvir Singh

The world is full of religions, but none as timeless as shamanism. And whilst many modern religions have shed their shamanic skins, the shaman is rarely as far away as we

The Origins of Humankind: Where Do We Really Come From?

Happy 2026! On Humans has typically marked the coming of January by revisiting the previous year’s most popular episode. This time, the New Year special packs the five-ho

Why Do We Laugh? Philosophers on Jokes, Humor, and the Human Condition ~ Mira Magdalena Sickinger

“The podcast is great, but one thing hasn’t been covered yet: humour. It’s an essential part of our human condition, and would certainly be worth an episode.” This liste

Restless Humanity: The Epic Migrations Into the Americas, Polynesia, and... Beyond? ~ Andrés Moreno-Estrada

We are a movable species. In less than 50 thousand years, Homo sapiens has penetrated practically all corners of the earth. This is an episode about those epic migratio

Beyond Race: A New Outlook on the Shape of Humanity ~ Diyendo Massilani

European thinkers once divided humanity into distinct "races". The idea stuck, even if the science moved on. The shape of humanity, it turned out, is far messier than the

The Neanderthal Mirror: Latest Findings About the Lines Between Us ~ David Gokhman

Genetics is rewriting the human story. This week, On Humans takes you behind the scenes of this rapidly evolving frontier via three live-recordings, captured at the Salk

Can We Tell a (True) Story of Human Origins? Live from UC San Diego

The science of human origins keeps producing new theories. But are we any closer to telling a true story of human origins? Or are we simply drowning in data?  Earlier th