The Origin of Humans

About the lecture

In the first mini-lecture, we begin by appreciating the history of human evolution. To do so, we cover Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and the three parameters that determine whether a species will evolve over time. The evolution of humans to the modern version we know today is a complex story intertwined with closely related species, and in this lecture we begin to understand where it all began for the modern human. We start by tracing the first steps of humanity across the globe, originating in Africa, and discuss some of the incredible things we have learned about our history, including how humans became endangered by some major event.

About the lecturer

Matthew Cobb is a British zoologist and professor of zoology at the University of Manchester. He is known for his popular science books "The Egg & Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex", "Life and Growth"; "Life's Greatest Secret": "The Race to Crack the Genetic Code"; "The Idea of the Brain: A History", "Smell: A Very Short Introduction", and "The Genetic Age: Our Perilous Quest to Edit Life". Cobb has appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, The Life Scientific, and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, as well as on BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service. Cobb earned his BA in Psychology at the University of Sheffield. During the second year of his undergraduate studies he read an article about the recent discovery of the Drosophila melanogaster dunce mutant in New Scientist and decided to focus on behaviour genetics in fruit flies, later saying he, "went on to do my PhD there, in Psychology and Genetics, looking at the mating behaviour of seven species of fruitfly. Psychology in those days was as much about animal behaviour as it was about human psychology, and I was lucky enough to be in one of the few places in the UK that studied [it]".