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Forest World.

Hi, I'm Pearl Mackey.

I play Pan in Forest 404, and I'm here to introduce our penultimate pod talk to a company episode 8.

Today is an ode to Thia, the last ever biological human, which made us think, beyond the world of Forest Four Oval,

how far are we from real-life human extinction?

To guide us through is Michael Rivera,

a biological anthropologist working in the Department of Archaeology

at the University of Cambridge.

He'll point out how, for instance,

the Neanderthals didn't make it in the long

run. And maybe we won't either, thanks to a number of glitches with hygiene, nutrition, global

warming. But reasons to be cheerful include the story of our evolution so far, the possibilities

in genetic engineering and stem cell research, not to mention good old-fashioned space travel. Over to Michael for more.

Our evolutionary history starts around 6 million years ago when we diverged from our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, the bonobos and chimpanzees.

In the grand scheme of things, humans and other primates are not that old

a species. We have very short evolutionary histories. When we look at turtles, for example,

turtles have been around for 200 million years, and animals like jellyfish and sea sponges

for 700 million years or more, making them some of the oldest living animals on Earth.

The oldest existing species is the cyanobacterium, which is a microorganism scientists have found evidence for,

embedded in sedimentary rocks dating to 3.5 billion years old.

The oldest species here have quite simple anatomies, so it seems that simplicity in form

...