Developments in new technology such as DNA sequencing have transformed our understanding of the Neanderthals, one of a group of archaic humans who occupied Europe, the Middle East and Western Asia more than 300,000 years ago.First identified by fossil remains in 1856 in a German quarry, the Neanderthals led an extremely physical existence as hunter-gatherers. They were stronger than us, adaptable as a species to huge variations in climate, with brains as large as ours and sophisticated ways of creating tools.Many of us carry some of the DNA of Neanderthals, thanks to interbreeding with homo sapiens. Although the Neanderthals today are no longer with us, their story has a lot to tell us about ourselves and our future survival on the planet. Rajan Datar is joined by Janet Kelso, a computational biologist and Group Leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She specialises in the analysis of DNA sequencing of ancient people such as Neanderthals; Katerina Harvati, the Senckenberg Professor for Paleoanthropology and Director of the Institute for Archaeological Sciences at the University of Tübingen. Her work focuses on the origins of modern humans and Neanderthal evolution; and archaeologist and writer Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Honorary Fellow in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. Her award-winning book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art was published in 2020.Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service (Image: Neanderthal Female, re-created by artists Andrie and Alfons Kennis. Photo: Joe McNally/Getty Images)

A Russian army stands at the gates of the capital of another country, a country that Russia has previously occupied and one that, according to Russian politicians, has no right to independent existence. Sounds familiar? That capital city was Warsaw and the year was 1920. But what happened in Poland just after the end of World War One bears strong similarities to what went on near Kyiv in 2022.After the First World War, Russian Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular, wanted to reoccupy Poland, and indeed Ukraine, Belarus and some other countries, so that they could serve as a bridge for exporting communist revolution to Western Europe. The Poles resisted even though at first they were outnumbered and outgunned by the Russians. The result was the Polish-Bolshevik war which was not fully resolved until 1921 and which had a big impact on the future shape of inter-war Europe.To guide us through the Polish-Bolshevik war are three distinguished historians: Dr. Pawel Duber, researcher at Nottingham Trent University whose work focuses on Poland in the first half of the 20th Century; Anita Prazmowska, professor of International History at London School of Economics and the author of many publications on Polish history in the last century and beyond; Robert Service, emeritus professor of Russian history at Oxford University, whose books cover Russia from the Mongol conquest to Putin.(Photo: Red Army on the Polish front, c.1920. Credit: Photo 12/Getty Images)

The pandemic has made us all rethink how we work. Where once millions of people used to travel into work in tall glass buildings in big cities every day, now our idea of the office has come to include the kitchen table or maybe even a coffee shop. Yet despite the temptation to shift permanently to remote working, many organisations say the events of the past few years have actually underlined the importance of offices as spaces that connect people. So what are offices for? We are delving back into the history of the modern office to learn how past designs could help us in the future. Presenter Rajan Datar is joined by three guest experts:Nigel Oseland is an environmental psychologist and consultant at Workplace Unlimited in the UK. He's the author of Beyond the Workplace Zoo: Humanising the Office.Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler is Associate Professor of Design History at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She's the author of Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office.And Agustin Chevez is a workplace researcher and architect, and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Centre for Design Innovation at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. He's the author of The Pilgrim's Guide to the Workplace.Producer: Jo Impey(Photo: Modern coworking interior with an open-plan office lounge and plants; Credit: ExperienceInteriors/Getty Images)

In the summer of 1946 inflation in Hungary reached 41.9 quadrillion per cent. That’s 41.9 followed by 14 zeros – the highest rate of inflation ever recorded anywhere in the world. It meant prices of everyday goods and services doubled, on average, every 15 hours.As the shattered country struggled to get to its feet after World War Two, weighed down by a Soviet occupation and punishing reparations, its government had little choice but to print more and more money, further fuelling the price spiral.The hyperinflation stripped wages of almost all their value and plunged millions of Hungarians into a new fight for survival, but as they lost all faith in banknotes they turned to ever more inventive ways to trade and earn a living. We discuss how life for ordinary Hungarians changed amidst the chaos, what caused and eventually halted the economic disaster, and what the whole episode can tell us about the meaning of money. Bridget Kendall is joined by Béla Tomka, professor of modern social and economic history at the University of Szeged, in Hungary; László Borhi, the Peter A Kadas Chair and associate professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies in the Hamilton-Lugar School at Indiana University, USA; and Pierre Siklos, professor of economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada.Producer: Simon Tulett(Picture: Hungarian pengo banknotes lying on the ground in Budapest. Credit: Louis Foucherand/AFP via Getty Images)

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring has probably done more than any other to raise concerns about the damage that uncontrolled use of chemicals can cause to the natural world. Carson imagined a ‘silent spring’ in a world where birds no longer sang, killed off by indiscriminate spraying of pesticides. Her plea for caution when using insecticides led to major changes in government regulation of agrochemicals both in the United States and elsewhere.So who was Rachel Carson? How did this scientist with a passionate interest in marine biology turn first into a best-selling author and then into an environmental campaigner? And - six decades on - have the warnings of Silent Spring been heeded?Bridget Kendall is joined by Dr. Sabine Clarke, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at University of York with a particular interest in the history of synthetic insecticides; Michelle Ferrari, an award-winning film maker who directed a documentary about Rachel Carson's life for the American public broadcaster PBS; and Professor David Kinkela, an environmental historian and chair of the Department of History at Fredonia, State University of New York whose books include 'DDT and the American Century'. The reader is Ina Marie Smith.(Photo: Airplane dusting a field with DDT. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

Explore the origins and significance of the seven-day week, from pagan and religious roots to economic and social dominance. Learn about failed attempts to change the week cycle and the influence of astrology on traditions. Discover the evolution of time measurement and the impact of the Gregorian calendar on globalized patterns.

Forugh Farrokhzad burst into the public consciousness with a series of poems that sent shockwaves through Persian society in the mid-1950s. Her early poetry focused on the female experience and female desire, overturning – in the words of one biographer – 1,000 years of Persian literature.Her critics sought to dismiss her skills as a writer by seeing her poetry purely as a confessional outburst of a divorced woman. That attitude has tended to overshadow her achievements, although her private life is so compelling it’s perhaps inevitable. Since her early death in a car accident, Forugh’s life and poetry have been inspirational for many Iranians, who see in her an artist who was prepared to defy authority and convention to speak out.Bridget Kendall is joined by Sholeh Wolpé, a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. She’s a poet, playwright, librettist and translator of Forugh’s work; author Jasmin Darznik, associate professor and chair of the creative writing progamme at California College of the Arts. Her novel, Song of a Captive Bird, is a re-imagining of Forugh’s life inspired by her poetry, interviews and correspondence; and Levi Thompson, Assistant Professor of Persian and Arabic Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s the author of Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry. Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service(Photo: Forugh Farrokhzad. Credit: Courtesy of Farrokhzadpoem.com)

Today’s counter-culture and alternative movements question mainstream norms, such as putting too much value on material possessions. The Cynics, practical philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, also rejected conventional desires to seek wealth, power and fame. They were not your usual kind of philosophers: rather than lecturing or writing about their ideas, they acted out their beliefs by denying themselves worldly possessions and tried to live as simply as possible. Their leader, Diogenes of Sinope, allegedly slept in a ceramic jar on the streets of Athens and ate raw meat like a dog, flouting convention to draw attention to his ideas.So who were the Cynics? How influential was their movement? What made it last some 900 years? And why does the term 'cynicism' have a different meaning today?Bridget Kendall is joined by three eminent scholars of Greek philosophy: Dr. William Desmond, Senior Lecturer in Ancient Classics at Maynooth University in Ireland and author of several books on the Cynics; Dr. Elena Cagnoli Fiecconi, Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at University College London; and Mark Usher, Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Vermont and author of new Cynic translations into English.(Image: The meeting of Alexander and Diogenes, detail from a tapestry, Scotland. Credit: DEA/S. Vannini/Getty Images)

Calories are fundamental to the way many of us view food and our own bodies - you’ll find them on supermarket shelves, restaurant menus, and in cookbooks. But they didn’t start out that way. Originally coined during the study of steam engines and industrial energy, the term ‘calorie’ was transformed into a measurement of food as ‘fuel’ for humans, influencing industrial, public health and even foreign policies for more than 100 years. It’s also spawned a multi-billion dollar diet industry – we learn about the author whose battle with her weight introduced the world to calorie counting. But should we be paying the calorie so much attention? There are growing concerns that it’s a misleading, perhaps even dangerous guide to how our bodies digest food and burn energy. Bridgett Kendall is joined by Dr Giles Yeo, professor of molecular neuroendocrinology at the University of Cambridge and author of ‘Why Calories Don’t Count: How we got the science of weight loss wrong’; Adrienne Rose Bitar, a specialist in the history and culture of American food and health at Cornell University, New York, and author of ‘Diet and the Disease of Civilization’; and Nick Cullather, professor of history and international studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Producer: Simon Tulett(Picture: A smartphone showing a calorie counting app and surrounded by fresh vegetables, donuts and other snacks on a table. Credit: Getty Images)

Belarusian lands have seen dramatic upheavals throughout the twentieth century and today, like its neighbour Ukraine to the south, Belarus finds itself on the cusp, in between the countries of the European Union on one side and Putin’s Russia on the other. While Belarus often features in the news, its history is less well known. So how far back does the story of Belarus go? How was its sense of national identity forged? And how did it survive the traumas and repressions that it has been subjected to by various invaders and imperial powers?Three historians of Eastern Europe join Bridget Kendall to answer these questions: Dr. Nelly Bekus, Lecturer at the University of Exeter who studies post-Soviet nations; Dr. Natalya Chernyshova, Senior Lecturer in modern history at Winchester University who researches the 20th century in Belarus and beyond; and Dr. Andrej Kotljarchuk, Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University in Sweden who focuses on the Second World War in Eastern Europe.(Photo: Mir Castle in Belarus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Credit: tbralnina/Getty Images)