It is decorated with fingerprints applied in red ochre that are similar to those found in the wall paintings in the cave. It was originally thought to have been used as a ceremonial cup, until new analyses in 2021 revealed that the shell was modified to be used as a musical wind instrument.

CNRS

Broken stalagmites arranged in circles indicate that humans started occupying caves more than 100 millennia before previously thought and knew how to use fire to navigate dark spaces well before Homo Sapiens.

Thomas Suddendorf TED Talk

“Our exceedingly mysterious and unique status on earth may be largely our own, rather than God’s creation.” What does this mean for our future?

Svante Pääbo, TED

Sharing the results of a massive, worldwide study, geneticist Svante Pääbo shows the DNA proof that early humans mated with Neanderthals after we moved out of Africa.

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

A series of experiments testing altruism in both very young children and chimpanzes.

PBS NOVA ScienceNOW

Watch the amazing story of how the genetic history of lice gives us clues to mysteries of our own evolution.

SABC Digital news

Explore the oldest known workshop for the deliberate planning, production and storage of a pigmented compound and for the use of a container.

New Scientist

Paleolithic animated pictures.

National Geographic

Researchers set up tests to show that great apes can recognize themselves in the mirror.

Spencer Wells takes us, as he says, on a journey that began “a long time ago [when] your family were on the brink of dying out. Yet, somehow against impossible odds they managed not only to survive but to become the most successful people on the planet.”

Such flutes were made from vulture bones and ivory from mammoth tusks. This one was found in the Swabian Jura mountains in southern Germany along with a bullroarer, which might have been used for dramatic effect. with a carved set of lines on it that resemble those found in cave paintings, indicating a trance state.

Ian Morris, Stanford Alumni

Are democracy and gender equality always good? Are violence and wealth inequality always bad? This presentation will dive into what drives changes in human values and what we as a society consider good or evil.

Ian Morris, The RSA

Combining history, anthropology and social science, Stanford historian and archaeologist Ian Morris looks afresh at our global past, present and future.

Dr. Eleanor Robinson, University of Cambridge

Learn to write numbers using the Babylonian base-60 system.

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shows how our language can even change what color you see when you look out at the world.

Ted Talk

UCTVSeminars

Do speakers of different languages think differently? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do bilinguals think differently when speaking different languages? Does language shape our thinking only when we’re speaking, or does it shape our attentional and cognitive patterns more broadly?

The Hurrian Hymn is history’s oldest known song. It’s the earliest written song that can be reconstructed.

BBC

A BBC documentary about the history of numbers, and in particular, the number 1.

Marcus de Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, reveals the vital importance of the Bakhshali Manuscript to the history of mathematics. Surviving leaf fragments from this birch bark scroll originate from the Indian subcontinent. They are over 1,800 years old and provide the first evidence to date of the invention of zero.

Science in the Golden Age of Islam.

BBC

How did the first farmers sustain a large community and build Göbekli Tepe 12,000 years ago?

This film tells the magnificent story of a temple complex is so impeccably preserved, with evidence so clear, that it might as well have been carved yesterday.

By Jim Al-Khalili.

Bart D. Ehrman, Heyns Lecture Series, Stanford University

How might the process of transcription have led to misunderstandings of the life and teachings of Jesus?

What cultural role did this 4.4″ tall statuette of a female figure play in society over 25,000 years ago?

An animated version of Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave.

BBC full series with Jim Al-Khalili

The history of Islamic science and it’s subsequent spread through Europe.

National Geographic

Many secrets remain surrounding the creation of Stonehenge. Archaeologists try to unravel the mystery.

Around 1,200 BC, an ancient Armageddon destroyed nearly every known civilization. What could have caused it? The theories are many, but most now include one mysterious and massively destructive factor – a force only the Egyptians survived to name: The Sea People.

Paul Goldsmith, ASC and Alan P. Garfinkel

Hidden away in the canyons of a top secret military base on the edge of the Mojave Desert is the largest concentration of rock art in North America. Created over thousands of years by a now vanished culture, it represents the oldest art in California. Talking Stone explores the remote canyons and mysteries surrounding these amazing images.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's latest book, The Anxious Generation, is shaping cultural conversations and sparking fierce debates about the role of smartphones in society. In this timely conversation, he investigates how a smartphone-based childhood, amplified by overprotective parenting, is driving the mental health crisis among young people. He also explores the push for phone bans in schools and the concrete steps we can take to improve the mental health of young people around the world.

International Energy Agency

The IEA’s latest report, Digitalization & Energy, is the first-ever comprehensive effort to depict how digital technologies could transform the world’s energy systems.

National Geographic

Based on the book by Jared Diamond.

Stanford University School of Engineering

Renée DiResta is research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a multi-disciplinary center that focuses on abuses of information technology, particularly social media. She’s an expert in the role technology platforms and their “curatorial” algorithms play in the rise and spread of misinformation and disinformation.

The vast majority of US teens have access to a smartphone and at least one social media account, and recent headlines seem to confirm parents’ worst fears about the effects of all that time spent online. But psychologists’ research suggests that there are nuanced answers to the question of how social media affects teens’ mental health and well-being. Linda Charmaraman, PhD, director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Research Lab at the Wellesley Centers for Women, discusses how teens use social media today, its impact on their mental health, and what parents, educators and others can do to maximize its benefits and minimize its potential harms.

Learn why and how plastic was originally developed and how we have reaped the wonderful benefits of this unique material while inadvertently creating our current struggle with its disposal and dangers.

Oxford Martin School

Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world.

TED 2016

Al Gore, founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, poses three questions that will determine the future of our planet---and why there’s good reason to be optimistic.

Mark Jacobson presents solutions for global warming and air pollution and energy price stability.

National Geographic

This epic documentary follows Leonard DiCaprio’s 3-year journey around the world to examine firsthand the effects of climate change and delivers a hopeful view of how we can prevent catastrophic damage that could make the Earth unsustainable for human life.

Professor Ruth DeFries asks “How did we get to be the species that dominates the planet? Can we see any pattern? Can we see any guidance for the future by taking this long lens back on our domination?”

Globally, one out of three people don’t have ready access to safe drinking water. Why can’t we just take seawater, filter out the salt, and have an unlimited supply of clean, fresh water? Find out why this is a last resort.

The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit working on methods of cleaning our oceans of plastic—including stopping plastic from entering the ocean in the first place. This video explains their unique technology for cleaning debris from our rivers to prevent the pollution from spreading to the oceans.

Center for Large Landscape Conservation

Learn how all of us can help avoid landscape fragmentation, where roads and other human activities divide habitat into isolated patches and make it difficult for wildlife to thrive.

Sandra Faber, Kraw Lecture Series, UC Santa Cruz

National Medal of Science winner Sandra Faber describes how the profound insights of cosmology take the issue of sustainability out of the personal and into a more objective consideration of where---and if---we are going.

Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) / Pathways for Wildlife

We know from scientific studies and Native American records that coyotes and badgers have been known to hunt together. But this is the first documentation (that we know of) where a coyote and badger use a human-made structure to travel together safely.

Extinction Radio

Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak—sooner than you think.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the magnitude of waste created by our simple, everyday habits. This depiction of the plastic bottles we discard vividly demonstrates the extent of plastic refuse.

Learn the details of how plastic recycling is actually done—and why it’s so difficult to do effectively.

Learn the way that climate change is causing extreme storms, drought and floods.

What has googly eyes and is cleaning up the harbor of Baltimore, USA? Meet the Trash Wheel Family – Mr. Trash Wheel, Professor Trash Wheel, Captain Trash Wheel, and Gwynnda the Good Wheel of the West.

For those who escaped the famines of the 1980s, the current drought in Ethiopia brings back memories of a time they hoped never to see again. Experiencing the worst drought in 50 years, residents of Tsemera in the Northern Highlands have seen their streams dry up and their crops fail. (From Thomson Reuters)

Cambridge Conservation Initiative

Several recent restoration projects on both land and sea provide cause for real optimism and demonstrate how we can make ecosystems more resilient and enable species to return to their natural habitats.

The Swim

It’s not an island twice the size of Texas. But it is severely impacting marine life and human health… and incredibly hard to study.

It’s Okay to Be Smart

This time, we’re the asteroid. A history of mass extinctions.

Elizabeth Kolbert, Heinz Award-winning staff writer for the New Yorker and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006), discusses her book The Sixth Extinction at OSU.

Is one degree of warming really that big a deal? Yes, it is, and find out why it could lead to even greater climate threats.

Center for Large Landscape Conservation

This video illustrates the importance of large landscape conservation—why connected natural areas are so critical—not only for wildlife, but for all of us.

Future West

This video illustrates how ranchers in the western U.S.A manage their land, including its wildlife, and see why working ranches are critical to habitat connectivity and wildlife preservation.

Right to Information and SDGs

Freedom of information is closely linked to a culture of openness. Open and inclusive societies protect press freedom crucial to sustainable development.

Cryptocurrencies’ decentralized model of generating trust limits their potential to replace conventional money.

Four faculty members share their perspective on William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden.

The author of The White Man’s Burden discusses his book that changed the debate on aid, and the role the West should play to promote economic, social, and political development in the developing world.

Global health expert Alanna Shaikh talks about the current status of the 2019 nCov coronavirus outbreak and what this can teach us about the epidemics yet to come.