Chris Stringer
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2012
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jim Al-Khalili meets leading paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer to find who our ancestors were. As a post graduate Chris went on a road trip with a difference, driving round Europe in an old Morris Minor measuring Neanderthal skulls. After being thrown out of several countries, the results of his analysis led to a controversial theory which ran counter to what many people thought at the time. Chris suggested that our most recent relative originated in Africa. He also reveals how genetics has transformed his work and talks about his own unconventional origins.
That there were cannibals in Somerset is one of the more surprising findings of Chris' work on early man in Britain and Jim discovers what it's like to work on an archaeological dig.
Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Once you've wrapped up this podcast, how about trying a very British cult? |
| 0:06.0 | What happens if the person you trust with your future isn't what you think they are? |
| 0:10.0 | I did feel the whole time he was watching me Yeti. I saw a footprint and that really gave me gusmas. |
| 0:16.4 | Or people who knew me. Emme, I remember every secret, every lie. I'm the only one who knows the truth. |
| 0:23.0 | Discover more of our biggest podcast from 2003. |
| 0:27.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.0 | Thank you for downloading The Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:35.0 | A childhood obsession with human evolution and a trip round Europe in an old Morris Minor |
| 0:41.0 | led today's guest to revolutionize how we think about where we as humans |
| 0:46.4 | have come from. Chris Stringer is a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London |
| 0:52.4 | and studied the origins of man during the |
| 0:54.6 | subject's most dynamic and exciting period of research. |
| 0:59.6 | His out-of-Africa theory that modern man first evolved in Africa and from there spread to the |
| 1:05.1 | rest of the world overturned previous ideas including that we were direct |
| 1:10.1 | descendants of the Neanderthals. This turned into a bitter long-running scientific |
| 1:15.7 | controversy. Chris is also interested in ancient humans in Britain and the |
| 1:21.0 | discovery that the early inhabitants of Somerset were cannibals who |
| 1:24.7 | drank out of skulls gives us a gruesome insight into how ancient Britain's lived and died. |
| 1:31.6 | Welcome, Chris. |
| 1:33.0 | Well, thank you. |
| 1:34.0 | Chris, is it true you became interested in fossils and Neanderthals as a young boy at school and |
| 1:39.5 | were a frequent visitor to the Natural History Museum? Not unusual in itself, but the fact that this is |
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