On this week’s show: Tracing the arrival of rats using bones, isotopes, and a few shipwrecks; and what scientists have learned in 50 years about our famous ancestor Lucy
First on the show: Did rats come over with Christopher Columbus? It turns out, European colonists weren’t alone on their ships when they came to the Americas—they also brought black and brown rats to uninfested shores., a researcher in the Trent Environmental Archaeology Lab at Trent University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how tiny slices of bone from early colony sites and sunken shipwrecks can tell us—a likely human ancestor that lived 2.9 million to 3.3 million years ago.
So before we discovered Lucy, there had been fossils discovered in the East Africa in the 1950s and '60s that showed us that members of our genus, Homo, showed up around two million years ago or so. And it had been a long time coming because Darwin had predicted back in the 1870s that members of the human family arose in Africa rather than in Asia. But fossils weren't discovered until the 1920s in South Africa that showed that Africa was probably the place where human ancestors arose.
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