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Latest episodes
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How Do Humans Fit into the Story of Life? ~ Jonathan Loh
September 25, 2026 · 1 hr 17 min“What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction!” — Blaise Pascal. No moment in my teaching career has left a deeper impression on me than a biology class I gave in 2018. The topic was…
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Beyond Paleo: A Culinary History of Humanity ~ Daniel Lieberman
August 24, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min“What do you think of the paleo diet?” To my surprise, this has become the most common question I get after telling people that I cover human evolution. I’ve long struggled to answer. Yes, the idea makes a lot of sense: humans evolved as…
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When Did Globalisation Really Begin? ~ Valerie Hansen
July 25, 2026 · 48 minWe can decide to stay home, but even then, the wider world is always close to our skin. From global trade to ideas that travel across continents, the wider world is always woven into our modern life. Since when has this been the…
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The Why of War and the How of Peace, Part II: Lessons from Prehistory ~ Douglas P. Fry
June 21, 2026 · 42 minHow old is war? Does it stretch deep into human origins, or did warfare become common only as growing populations settled down? In Part II of this conversation with Douglas P. Fry, we return to the long-running debate about the origins of…
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The Why of War and the How of Peace, Part I: Lessons from the Modern World ~ Douglas P. Fry
June 19, 2026 · 48 minHistory is full of wars. Why? Is war driven by fear? Greed? Revenge? Ambitious leaders? Is it rooted deep in human nature—or does it emerge only under particular social conditions? And what do we learn if we change the angle from wars to…
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The Big Picture: Measuring the Origins of the Modern World ~ Bishnupriya Gupta & Stephen Broadberry (Great Divergence #5)
May 14, 2026 · 47 minWas India once an affluent empire, later impoverished by British colonisation? Or was India never rich to begin with? More generally, what does historical data on wages and other economic indicators tell us about the broader story of the…
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A View From the East: China, Japan, and the Other Paths to Prosperity ~ Debin Ma (Great Divergence #4)
May 7, 2026 · 47 minThe tech gap between China and the West is closing fast. But why did the land that invented paper and gunpowder ever fall behind? Debin Ma is the world’s leading economic historian of East Asia. In this fourth episode of our Great…
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Why Did the Industrial Revolution Happen in Britain? ~ Robert Allen (Great Divergence #3)
April 29, 2026 · 59 minWhy was industrial modernity born in Europe and not, say, China? This is one of the most consequential questions about the origins of the modern world. Yet asking “why Europe” can mislead. The Industrial Revolution was not a European…