I'm counting down to the new year here by re-releasing favorite past episodes from the archives of my other podcast homes each day until 2021. Hope you'll discover a memorable voice or two you might have missed before. These episodes are free for all; next on the docket are new episodes for paying subscribers only, including conversations with Armand Leroi and Alina Chan.
My conversation with Armand releases today for paid subscribers.
With the steady downpour of new fossil finds and ever more freshly sequenced ancient DNA, ours is an era of plenty in the field of human evolution. In June of 2020, I had a chance to record a long discussion for The Insight podcast with Chris Stringer, one of the doyens of human paleoanthropology. We talked about all the discoveries we've been lucky to witness over the past few years on these topics of such incredible interest to the general public.
Stringer has been active in the field for decades, first as an early advocate of the African origin of modern humans, and now as an all-around synthesizer and public intellectual. His gift for communicating the pith of abstruse results is on fine display in this conversation. I enjoyed it very much and I hope you will too.
This is day 6 of 6. Here is day 1: Shadi Hamid, day 2: Vagheesh Narasimhan, day 3: Thomas Chatterton Williams, day 4: Alexander Ioannidis, day 5: Suhag Sukhla.
And in case you missed them in the busy runup to the holidays, here is my series of five quick pieces from last week:
The Age of Genetic Engineering Begins
One reason I shared this sampler of my writing was to leave those considering a subscription plenty of time to grab one at Substack’s lowest rates before I adjust the pricing upward in the new year.
Podcast countdown to 2021 - day 6, Chris Stringer: the state of paleoanthropology in the 2010's