Episode 29

The Human Family Shrub: Part 1

Anna and Amber work their way up the trunk of our shared evolutionary tree, tackling the thorny issues of identifying our earliest mammal, primate, and hominin ancestors. We learn about the early development of bipedal walking, and really struggle (as usual) with the question of deep time, but this week it escalates to wondering how anybody knows anything. All we know is, we didn’t come from no monkey.

To learn more about what we discuss this week, check out:

These Rodent-Like Creatures Are the Earliest Known Ancestor of Humans, Whales and Shrews (LiveScience)

Human Evolution Timeline Interactive (Smithsonian Institution)

New faces of Aegyptopithecus from the Oligocene of Egypt (Journal of Human Evolution)

Sahelanthropus: "The femur of Toumaï?" (John Hawks Weblog)

Femur findings remain a secret (Nature)

Geology and Paleontology of the Late Miocene Middle Awash Valley, Afar Rift, Ethiopia (Nature, via ResearchGate)

The life history of Ardipithecus ramidus: A heterochronic model of sexual and social maturation (Anthropological Review, via ResearchGate)

Ardipithecus ramidus and the evolution of language and singing: An early origin for hominin vocal capability (HOMO)

Evolution: The First Four Billion Years

Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins (Nature)

Why Pregnant Women Don’t Tip Over (New York Times)

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.