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welcome to this week's nature podcast.

This week in the show, piecing together homin history from stone tools and growing peril for the world's coral reefs.

Plus, whale song out of the water and fetal workouts.

This is the nature podcast for the 1st of February 2018.

I'm Benjamin Thompson and I'm Charmany Bundell.

Almost two million years ago, our ancient ancestor Homo erectus is estimated to a first migrated out of Africa.

This is a time known to archaeologists as the Lower Paleolithic.

These hominins took with them the most cutting-edge technology available, including teardrop

shaped stone tools known as Ashulian hand axes.

As time progressed and hominins evolved, the world transitioned into the middle Paleolithic,

a period marked by a decline in Ashulian technologies and the development of more advanced

and specialized tools.

Because of the scarcity of hominin fossil remains, there's a lot we don't know about the Middle Paleolithic.

This means that studying stone tools is a good way of working out the movements of ancient populations and knowledge.

This is one of the time period when you have a lot of debates going on on dispersals of hominine species,

both modern humans as well as other species.

This is Shanti Papu from the Sharma Center for Heritage Education in India.

One of the key questions which everyone is looking at is how and where and when they both

and what was happening in terms of interaction with local cultures, which were already there in various places.

So this is one of the things which we are looking at.

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