Early Humans Were Even Earlier Than We Thought
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Early human fossils from Morocco suggest our ancestors walked the earth much earlier than previously thought. Human ancestral fossils from the area were first discovered in the 1960's, but now a re-examination of these and more recent finds suggests they are from an early form of us - Homo sapiens - living in the area around 300,000 years ago.
We have news of a one in a million stellar observation: light bending around a distant star. This is the first time the phenomenon has been observed outside our solar system, and is further proof of Einstein's theory of General Relativity. It involved measurements millions of miles away and many times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Gold mining is a highly polluting process involving toxic chemicals. Marnie Chesterton visits a Scottish gold mine and looks at attempts to make the extraction of gold more environmentally friendly by replacing the toxic chemicals with ingredients more commonly found in vitamins and natural fertilisers.
And US President Trump has announced his intention to pullout of the Paris climate agreement. We look at the implications of the decision for global emissions reduction.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Fladiated. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:25.0 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. |
| 0:29.0 | Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 9th of June 2017 |
| 0:36.6 | I'm Adam Rutherford and just a quick plug for that other program I do with the legendary maths guru |
| 0:41.2 | Hannah Frye the curious cases of Rutherford and Fry, pod listeners get super value |
| 0:46.3 | for money even though it's completely free obviously, as we include loads of bonus material |
| 0:50.9 | mostly of us monkeying around. Anyway, for this week's Inside Science, I'm back to the Natural History |
| 0:56.9 | Museum in London because human evolution had to be rewritten yet again this week. |
| 1:01.8 | Hello, this week a one in a million observation of the bending of light around a white dwarf |
| 1:07.6 | and how this is further validating general relativity in a way that Einstein never believed would be seen. |
| 1:14.0 | Back on Earth, the current administration in the White House has declared that they will withdraw |
| 1:17.6 | the United States from the Paris Accord on climate change. |
| 1:20.7 | We do the analysis on what this might mean for the accord and for planet Earth. |
| 1:25.5 | And we're off to Scotland to visit a gold mine. |
| 1:28.4 | Yes, there is gold in them thar hills, and scientists are trying to make extraction less toxic and more |
| 1:34.6 | environmentally friendly. One of the components that we can mix it together with |
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