What killed off North American megafauna, and making languages less complicated

Science Magazine Podcast

Science Podcast

News Commentary, News, Science

4.2 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ancient wildfires may have doomed Southern California’s big mammals, and do insular societies have more complex languages? First up on this week’s show, what killed off North America’s megafauna, such as dire wolves and saber-toothed cats? Online News Editor Mike Price joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the likely culprits: climate or humans, or one that combines both—fire. They discuss how the La Brea Tar Pits are helping researchers figure this out. Read the related Science paper. Next up, do languages get less complex when spoken in multilingual societies? Olena Shcherbakova, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, joins Sarah with a broad look at how the complexity of languages changes under different social and linguistic environments. In a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Jackie Oberst, associate editor for custom publishing, discusses with Trine Bartholdy, chief innovation officer at the BioInnovation Institute, an international life science incubator in Copenhagen, Denmark, about the continued disparity in women’s health research and funding and ways in which these challenges are being overcome. This segment is sponsored by the BioInnovation Institute. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Authors: Sarah Crespi, Mike Price Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3475 About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:37.2	This podcast is supported by the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai,
0:41.4	one of America's leading research medical schools.
0:44.8	Icon Mount Sinai is the academic arm of the eight hospital Mount Sinai health system in New York
0:50.0	City.
0:50.9	It's consistently among the top recipients of NIH funding. Researchers at Icon Mount Sinai have
0:57.2	made breakthrough discoveries in many fields vital to advancing the health of patients, including
1:02.4	cancer, COVID and long COVID, cardiology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The Icon
1:09.8	School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, we find a way.
1:18.9	This is the science podcast for August 18, 2023.
1:23.3	I'm Sarah Presby.
1:24.9	First up this week, what killed off North America's megafauna?
1:28.9	We're talking dire wolves and saber-tooth cats.
1:32.0	Online news editor Mike Price joins me to talk about the likely villains in their demise.
1:37.1	Climate, humans, or a new contender, fire.
1:40.8	He also shares a bit about his visit to the La Brea Tar Pits,
1:44.0	where researchers are trying to figure this out.
	...

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