Mar 9, 2021

In this episode I want to introduce you to someone.  Actually, this someone is a thing, and this thing wiggled its way through life between two to four billion years ago.

Listener, meet LUCA. Your Last Universal Common Ancestor.

LUCA, meet your descendant.

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Feb 2, 2021

As a kid I was fascinated by the idea of cavemen.  Of course, all I had to go on were a few poorly produced movies that depicted cavemen battling dinosaurs, which of course never happened.  I even owned an early plastic model of a Cro-Magnon man and woman.  To me the Cro-Magnon were indistinguishable from the...

Jan 5, 2021

Many years ago, in 1977, astronomer and author Carl Sagan offered us the concept of a “Cosmic Calendar” in his book The Dragons of Eden.  It’s a fun thought experiment in which you take the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang until now, and represent it as calendar year. 

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Dec 22, 2020

It's time to look at fossil dating again!  The last episode mentioned two dating methods used to estimate how old the Homo Naledi bones found the Rising Star cave system might be. To do so, researchers used a Uranium-thorium method as well as electron spin resonance, or “ESR”.  Let's take a brief look at what each...

Dec 8, 2020

Quite a few episodes back, I produced a show that looked at a new hominin species discovered in 2013. This history-changing discovery happened when paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, assisted by cavers Rick Hunter and Steve Tucker, explored the Rising Star Cave in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. I thought it’s...