November 20, 2017 8:00 pm

Tuesday, Natalia Reagan Guides Us Through Our Bio-Anthro Mashup

It’s always great to bring you the best of the best and this Thanksgiving week on StarTalk All-Stars, the best of the best is what we’ll bring. All-Stars host and primatologist Natalia Reagan has set a holiday feast with great guests and co-hosts and plenty of tasty biology and anthropology themed dishes featuring Homo sapiens, great apes, early humans, and modern humans for you to enjoy – intellectually, not gastronomically. (Proof that you can stretch a metaphor too far!)

Our first course features Natalia, comic co-host Sarah Siskind, and paleoanthropologist Shara Bailey investigating the recent Homo sapien discovery in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco that pushes back the origins of humanity another 100,000 years. What I like about this conversation is that although 100,000 years seems like a long time to us, Shara points out that it’s infinitesimal in terms of geological time – or the timeline of the universe. Proving to me that a cosmic perspective can be applied to many areas of study.

In our next course, Natalia is joined by Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice to answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about primatology including primate hybrids and the possibility of primates on TRAPPIST-1. Plus, Natalia reveals her favorite primate.

After that, you’ll hear Natalia chat with Sarah Siskind and anthropologist Will-Harcourt Smith about Neanderthal culture – including cave paintings and ritualistic burials.

Finally, for dessert, Natalia is joined by comic co-host Patrick Melton and paleoanthropologist Marc Kissel to explore the history of wisdom, language, and humanity’s shared evolutionary history.

Please join us tomorrow night for StarTalk All-Stars at Bio-Anthro Mashup, with Natalia Reagan at 7pm ET right here on our website, as well as on our All-Stars channels on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. If you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too. And remember that you can also catch next week’s StarTalk All-Stars episode one week early on TuneIn, at tunein.com/startalkallstars.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen