On the introduction of Younghusband I’ve been looking through the back-issue episodes of TED and have been fascinated by this speech by Spencer Wells on human evolution and our common origins. The talk is brief and broad. It begins with a talk about our common ancestors, and then discussions the first anthropologists that tried to classify humans into different races. The talk then moves to Africa, where humans evolved, and how we survived the ice age and the crash of the human population where we almost went extinct. But our species survived this, and was followed by the departure from Africa by one subset of humans, who reproduced and migrated across the globe. For a while, the simples tools we used were the same—until at one point, all hell breaks loose and humans develop agriculture, art, religion, and complex language.

There is also an open invitation to participate in the Genographic Project. Learn more at the site here, and order your kit here.

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