Family ties and reshaping history

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From the influential part played by Sikh queens, through the ties of marriage and religion which helped shape the Western world, back to the links between Neanderthals and early man: Rana Mitter talks to Priya Atwal, Joseph Henrich, and Rebecca Wragg Sykes about family ties, power networks, and history.

Priya Atwal has published Royal and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire. Dr Atwal is a Teaching Fellow in Modern South Asian History at King's College London. Joseph Henrich is a Professor in the department of Human and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the author of The Weirdest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. Rebecca Wragg Sykes is an Honorary Fellow at University of Liverpool and Université de Bordeaux. She is the author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art and is one of the founders of https://trowelblazers.com/

You might be interested in other Free Thinking conversations with Rutger Bregman author of Human Kind https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08d77hx Penny Spikins speaking about Neanderthal history at the 2019 Free Thinking Festival https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003zp2 Tom Holland on his history of the impact of Christianity on Western thinking in a programme called East Meets West https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00093d1

Producer: Robyn Read

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.6	Hello, I'm Ron Amitter, and in this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, I'm talking family ties and histories
0:39.6	of early humans. We'll also talk about an Indian Empire and the rise of the West in a weird way.
0:46.5	Stay tuned to find out more. That'll be coming up just after this.
0:51.3	Before your Chosen podcast, my name's Ian McMillan, keeper of the box of delights that is the verb.
0:58.0	If you like poetry and stories and spoken word and performance and language that falls between the cracks, then the verb is for you.
1:07.1	Downloaders wherever you get your podcasts.
1:09.8	Hello. So, an archaeologist, an anthropologist and a historian walk into a radio discussion.
1:16.2	And they start to talk about kinship.
1:19.2	Bloodlines, extended family structures, affines and agnates,
1:23.3	which I promise you is not the follow-up to dungeons and dragons.
1:25.8	The ways in which human behaviour and our societies are shaped by our relationships with each other. Today on free-thinking,
1:34.1	I'm finding out how the past few years of digging up burial sites, processing genetic material
1:39.2	in the lab, and dusting off documents in archives have changed the way that we think of kinship.
1:45.7	Between the marriage habits of medieval monarchs,
1:48.1	the interbreeding habits of near humans in Siberian caves,
1:51.1	and the rise and fall of a dynasty underpinned by a network of polygamous power,
1:56.4	relative values have never seemed so fresh.
2:00.0	Tracing the paths through this show's DNA are my guests.
2:03.9	Rebecca Rag Sykes, author of Kindred, Neanderthal, Life, Love, Death and Art. Joseph Henrik,
	...

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