Sciences & Technology
Why don’t humans have tails?
Untangling our evolutionary history
Professor Bernard Wood on why greater evidence can make it even harder to trace our origins
Published 1 July 2016
Episode 371
We speak with renowned paleoanthropologist Professor Bernard Wood about how continuing research into fossil and other evidence of human evolutionary history produces insights but also reveals how much we have yet to learn.
How good, for example, are we at telling our recent ancestors and close relatives from those of the apes? How can we know how many species preceded our own? And can we tell which of those species are our ancestors, and which are non-ancestral close relatives?
“For some reason to do with climate or disease or some natural disaster, modern humans in Africa shrank to a really small population in the order of 10,000 individuals. So basically the message is that we nearly didn’t make it,” says Professor Wood.
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