How did humans take over the world?

We’re back in the archives with one of the biggest mysteries this show has ever taken on: us.

Modern humans have only been around for about 200,000 years, a blink of an eye next to the three billion years life has existed on Earth. We’re not the biggest, the fastest or the strongest animal out there, so how did we end up running the planet?

Dan and Michael follow the clues from a strange skull dug out of a German quarry in 1856 to the Neanderthal DNA almost all of us still carry. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Unstoppable Us, argues our real superpower is storytelling, and geneticist Aoife McLysaght explains why we share so much of our DNA with chimpanzees, and how humans are still evolving right now.

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