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Big Picture Science

Back off, you Nean­derthal! It sounds as if you’ve just been dissed, but maybe you should take it as a com­pli­ment. Con­trary to com­mon clich­es, our Pleis­tocene rel­a­tives were clever, curi­ous, and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly inven­tive. Find out how our assess­ment of Nean­derthals has under­gone a rad­i­cal rethink­ing, and hear about the influ­ence they have as they live on in our DNA. For exam­ple, some of their genes have a strong asso­ci­a­tion with severe Covid 19 infec­tion. Plus, how Nean­derthal mini-brains grown in a lab will teach us about the evo­lu­tion of Homo sapiens.

Guests:

Svante Pääbo – Evo­lu­tion­ary geneti­cist and Direc­tor of the Max Planck Insti­tute for Evo­lu­tion­ary Anthropology.

Doyle Ste­vick – Asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of edu­ca­tion­al lead­er­ship and poli­cies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Carolina.

Bev­er­ly Brown – Pro­fes­sor emeri­ta of anthro­pol­o­gy, Rock­land Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege, New York.

Rebec­ca Wragg Sykes – Pale­olith­ic anthro­pol­o­gist, author of Kin­dred: Nean­derthal Life, Love, Death and Art.”

Alysson Muotri — Neu­ro­sci­en­tist and pro­fes­sor of pedi­atrics, cel­lu­lar and mol­e­c­u­lar med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia San Diego School of Medicine