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Podcast: Big Picture Science
Episode:

Going All to Species

Category: Religion & Spirituality
Duration: 00:50:31
Publish Date: 2017-02-13 10:43:12
Description:

ENCORE Meet your new relatives.   The fossilized bones of Homo naledi are unique for their sheer number, but they may also be fill a special slot in our ancestry: the first of our genus Homo.   Sporting modern hands and feet but only a tiny brain, this creature may link us and our ape-like ancestors.   

Some anthropologists hail the discovery as that of a new hominid species.  Not all their colleagues agree.  Find out what’s at stake in the debate. 

Also, the scientist who helped retrieve the fossils describes her perilous crawl through a cave with only ten inches of elbow room.  And a radical theory about what these old bones might mean: could they be from a burial two million years ago?

Guests:

  • Marina Elliott  – Paleoanthropologist, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
  • Carl Ward – Biological anthropologist, University of Missouri
  • John Hawks- Anthropologist, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Tim White - Anthropologist, University of California, Berkeley
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