CARTA - Anthropogeny
Science & Ideas
About
Multidisciplinary researchers explore the origins of humanity and the many facets of what makes us human.
Episodes
- CARTA: The Idea Organ - Questions Answers and Closing Remarks
Humans live in a world of ideas—born in the brain, shared through language, accumulated in culture across generations, and made reality. From the first flaked stone tools to the building of shelters, from figurative and symbolic art to abs…
- CARTA: Development and Evolutionary Specializations of Human Cognitive Networks with Nenad Sestan
The extraordinary abilities of the cerebral cortex are central to what sets humans apart from other species. A defining feature of the cortex is its organization along a sensorimotor-to-association (S–A) axis, extending from primary sensor…
- CARTA: The Costs of Big Brains with Alex Pollen
Human brain expansion is often discussed in terms of the genetic and molecular innovations that drove uniquely human cognitive abilities. Yet evolution is fundamentally a process of tradeoffs. Disproportionate expansion of forebrain struct…
- CARTA: The Human Brain in its Usual Extraordinary and Compromised States with Bruce Miller
Dr. Bruce Miller, director of the UCSF Edward and Pearl Fein Memory and Aging Center, examines what neurodegenerative disease reveals about the neural basis of creativity and the social mind. Research in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) shows…
- CARTA: The Transformational Potential of Computer-assisted Brains with Joseph Paradiso
From stone tools and shelters to symbolic art and abstract thought, human history is shaped by a brain built to form and share ideas. Joseph Paradiso, Professor in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, explores what comes next afte…
- CARTA: The Evolution of the Human Brain through Shifts in Gene Regulation with Miles Wilkinson
A fundamental question in biology is: how did humans acquire their unique characteristics? What allows us to stand upright, while our primate ancestors walked on all fours? What brain alterations drove our increased intelligence and allowe…
- CARTA: Human Brain Specializations Related to Language and Theory of Mind with James Rilling
Humans excel at transmitting ideas, skills, and knowledge across generations, and at building on those competencies in a cumulative manner. James Rilling, Professor of Psychology at Emory University, explores how the transmission of our cu…
- CARTA: Hominin Paleoneurology During the Stone Age - and Before! with Dean Falk
The distinct biology of the human brain, scaffolded by language and culture, allows ideas to be formed, named, shared, and accumulated across generations. Dean Falk, Professor of Anthropology, Florida State University, explains how paleone…
- CARTA: Human-specific Alterations in Brain Cellular Proportions with Genevieve Konopka
Our brains are engines of imagination—an “idea organ” that has transformed both our species and the planet. Genevieve Konopka, Chair of the Department of Neurobiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, asks how genes drive the…
- CARTA: The Idea Organ - Welcome and Opening Remarks
Humans live in a world of ideas—born in the brain, shared through language, accumulated in culture across generations, and made reality. From the first flaked stone tools to the building of shelters, from figurative and symbolic art to abs…
- CARTA: Neanderthalizing Brain Organoids with Alysson Muotri
Humans live in a world of ideas—born in the brain, shared through language, accumulated in culture across generations, and made reality. Professor Alysson Muotri, UC San Diego Departments of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine,…
- CARTA: Ancient DNA: New Revelations - Questions Answers and Closing Remarks
Dramatic advances in ancient DNA technologies have revolutionized our understanding of the human past. As part of the CARTA symposium on Ancient DNA, the panelists answer questions about the diverse applications of archaeogenomics in shapi…
- CARTA: Population Genetics of Latin America and Oceania with Andrés Moreno-Estrada
Genetic data is transforming the understanding of our own species and refining historical chapters at different scales around the globe. However, despite the globalization of biotechnologies to analyze the human genome, indigenous populati…
- CARTA: Genetic History of Humans and Animals in South Asia with Maanasa Raghavan
The human genetic history of South Asia has been shaped by its pivotal location at the crossroads of East and West Eurasia, dramatic landscapes such as the Himalayas, and longstanding socio-cultural practices like endogamy. A consequence i…
- CARTA: Central Asian Population Genetics and Natural Selection with Ainash Childebayeva
Ancient DNA has revolutionized the study of the human past, providing unprecedented insights into ancient migrations and interactions among populations. Central Asia, due to its geographic location between Europe and Asia, has seen experie…
- CARTA: The Genetic History of Europe with Johannes Krause
Over the past decade, archaeogenetics has analyzed more than 15,000 ancient genomes spanning 45,000 years of western Eurasian prehistory, uncovering dozens of migrations that reshaped Europe. Johannes Krause, Max Planck Institute, traces t…
- CARTA: Ancient DNA - New Revelations Welcome and Opening Remarks
Dramatic advances in ancient DNA technologies have revolutionized our understanding of the human past. Since the publication of the first ancient human genomes in 2010, the field of archaeogenomics has grown at an astonishing pace, and tod…
- CARTA: Human Population History in North and East Asia with Choongwon Jeong
The Kazakh and Mongolian Steppes span 5,000 kilometers west to east along the northern latitude of Asia. This unique ecozone allowed rapid movements of people, animals, goods, and ideas across Eurasia since prehistory and harbored numerous…
- CARTA: Human Microbiome Evolution with Christina Warinner
Humans have a deep and complex relationship with microbes. Beyond disease, microbes also profoundly shape human health and behavior through their activity in the microbiome and their diverse roles in food and cuisine. And yet we know very…
- CARTA: Evolutionary Switches - How Regulatory Variants Shaped Human Evolution with David Gokhman
David Gokhman of the Weizmann Institute of Science explores how changes in gene regulation shaped recent human evolution. His team used massively parallel reporter assays in skeletal and neural cells to test 71,443 genetic variants that di…
- CARTA: Archaic Human Genomes with Diyendo Massilani
The sequencing of genomes from archaic humans, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, has transformed our understanding of human evolutionary history. These ancient genomes reveal that modern humans did not evolve in isolation but interbred…
- CARTA: Archaic Introgression Reveals Human Dispersals with Janet Kelso
The genome sequences of Neandertals and Denisovans have provided a wealth of new information about the origins, migrations, and interactions of ancient humans. These genomes have revealed that mixture between hominin groups was common: all…
- CARTA: Mismatch: Human Origins and Modern Disease - Questions Answers and Closing Remarks
The human body has traits that evolved at different times, from 1.5 billion to 2 million years ago, each bringing health benefits and risks. Multicellularity enabled organs and cancer. The immune system defends us but can cause inflammatio…
- CARTA: Three Smokes in the Evolution of the Human Exposome with Caleb Finch
Humans have long been exposed to three main types of smoke: from early domestic fires, modern wildfires, and more recently, tobacco and fossil fuel pollution. All release tiny particles from partly burned plants, containing harmful chemica…
- CARTA: The Industrialized Gut Microbiome with Justin and Erica Sonnenburg
The human gut microbiome is tightly linked our health. Our analyses of diverse human populations from around the globe, ranging from hunter-gatherer to industrialized, show that the gut microbiome is profoundly influenced by lifestyle. Wit…
- CARTA: Biocultural Reproduction: The Human Style of Hyper-cooperation with Barry Bogin
The essence of Being Human is the practice of Biocultural Reproduction (BCR). BCR is defined as the set of marriage and kinship based rules for extra-maternal cooperation in the production, feeding, and care of offspring. Human evolution t…
- CARTA: Osteoarthritis Back Problems Difficult Birth - Scars of Our Evolution? with Martin Häusler
Musculoskeletal disorders are one of the most important challenges of modern medicine worldwide. They are often attributed to maladaptations of our body to our peculiar form of locomotion, upright bipedalism. This lecture will explore the…
- CARTA: Primate Skeletal Gene Regulation: Risks of Human Skeletal Disease Specifically Osteoarthritis with Genevieve Housman
Phenotypic variation within the skeleton has biological, behavioral, and biomedical functional implications for individuals and species. Thus, it is critical to understand how genomic, environmental, and mediating regulatory factors combin…
- CARTA: Does the Placenta Drive the Evolution of Cancer Malignancy with Günter Wagner
The rate of cancer and cancer malignancy differ greatly among mammalian species. The placental – maternal interface is also highly variable between placental mammals. This lecture will discuss recent advances that suggest that there is a c…
- CARTA: Is There a Point to Periods? The Evolutionary History of Menstruation and Implications of Women's Health with Deena Emera
Menstruation is the cyclical shedding of the endometrium triggered by falling progesterone levels. Menstruation is a rare trait found in less than 2% of mammals and likely evolved independently at least 4 times. Why do some mammals menstru…
- CARTA: The Evolution of Powerful Yet Perilous Immune Systems with Andrea Graham
Pressures of life on Earth experienced by our ancestors – as multicellular beings, as hosts to parasites, and as home to microbes – shaped the evolved structure and function of our immune systems. Some of the traits favored by natural sele…
- CARTA: Cancer is Normal Development Spun Out of Control with Steve Frank
Cancer is normal development spun out of control. It is the great plasticity and power of development, without the overarching controls that guide normal development toward an integrated adult form. Instead, whenever a newly developed kind…
- CARTA: Mismatch: Human Origins and Modern Disease - Welcome and Opening Remarks
The human body has traits that evolved at different times, from 1.5 billion to 2 million years ago, each bringing health benefits and risks. Multicellularity enabled organs and cancer. The immune system defends us but can cause inflammatio…
- CARTA: Origins of Love - Questions Answers and Closing Remarks
Human beings show a range of emotional attachment, affection, and infatuation often referred to as “love”. Love promotes long-lasting and secure relationships that involve nurturing and support. Biological mechanisms underlying such behavi…
- CARTA: The Biology of Fatherhood in Humans: Evolutionary Origins and Cross-Cultural Perspectives with Lee Gettler
Human fathers exhibit hormonal shifts in testosterone, prolactin, and oxytocin, enabling flexible responses to parenting. In species with costly paternal care, these shifts balance mating and parenting efforts, suggesting evolved neuroendo…
- CARTA: Love Monogamy and Fatherhood in Latin American Monkeys with Eduardo Fernandez-Duque
The titi and owl monkeys of South America live in socially-monogamous groups where the male and female establish a pair bond and share parental duties. Why do males of these species mate in a monogamous relationship presumably foregoing ot…
- CARTA: The Biology of Grandmaternal Love with James Rilling
Grandmothers play a key role as alloparents in human families. A leading hypothesis suggests that the inclusive fitness benefits of grandmaternal care selected for an extended female lifespan after reproduction, a unique trait among primat…
- CARTA: Love Loss and Luminance with Karen Bales
Close relationships help us shape both our other social interactions as well as our internal physiology. Do these close relationships, also known as pair bonds, look and function similarly in species as diverse as titi monkeys, prairie vol…
- CARTA: Oxytocin's Pathway to the Origins of Speech and Dance with Constantina Theofanopoulou
Dr. Theofanopoulou studies neural circuits behind sensory-motor behaviors like speech and dance, aiming to develop drug- and arts-based therapies for brain disorders. Her brain imaging research reveals overlapping motor cortex regions cont…
- CARTA: Is Vasopressin the Key to Unlocking Our Understanding of Autism? with Karen J. Parker
Humans are an intensely social species. We experience social interactions as rewarding from infancy, and the social cognitive skills that we develop in the context of our earliest interpersonal attachments are critical for our survival and…
- CARTA: The Healing Power of Love: The Oxytocin Hypothesis with Sue Carter
Oxytocin is a peptide molecule with a multitude of physiological and behavioral functions. Based on its association with reproduction, including social bonding, sexual behavior, birth and maternal behavior, oxytocin also has been called “t…
- CARTA: Origins of Love - Welcome and Opening Remarks
Human beings show a range of emotional attachment, affection, and infatuation often referred to as “love”. Love promotes long-lasting and secure relationships that involve nurturing and support. Biological mechanisms underlying such behavi…
- CARTA: The Biology of Hatred: Why Love Turns to Hatred and What We Can Do About It with Ruth Feldman
Ancient texts warn of love turning into hatred, as seen in stories like Cain and Abel or “Et tu, Brute?” This talk explores the neurobiology of hatred based on the biology of love: the oxytocin system, attachment networks, and biobehaviora…
- CARTA: How Humans Came to Construct Their Worlds - Questions Answers and Closing Remarks
At a global level, Homo sapiens have reshaped the planet Earth to such an extent that we now talk of a new geological age, the Anthropocene. But each of us shapes our own worlds, physically, symbolically, and in the worlds of imagination.…
- CARTA: Toward a Smart Architecture of Habitats in the Age of Human-AI Symbiosis in an Eco-Aware World with Michael Fox
The symbolic tools we use to design and construct our environments have been transformed by the so-called Cybernetic revolution and the innovations in materials technology that have accompanied them. The integration of computers, the Inter…
- CARTA: The Architecture of Informality with Kristine Stiphany
This talk explores the needs of the poor and homeless around the world, charting the interplay between formal and informal settlements. The key example for this talk will be the favelas of Saõ Paulo in the context of a broader concern with…
- CARTA: Göbekli Tepe with Ricarda Braun
The site of Göbekli Tepe is well known as a settlement of the transitional phase in SW-Asia, in which the greater mobility of the Palaeolithic increasingly gave way to the more permanent settlement of the Neolithic. This talk uses the exam…
- CARTA: Deep Time Evolution of the Indigenous Peoples and Architectures of Australia with Paul Memmott
This presentation will briefly trace 70,000 years of cultural evolution from the ancient crossing from Sunda to Sahul, via the swift continental colonization during the Ice Age, through the severe impacts on survival during the Last Glacia…
- CARTA: How People Learned to Live in Cities with Michael Smith
The transition from Neolithic villages to early cities marked the greatest social transformation faced by our species before the Industrial Revolution. Our ancestors had to learn how to live in new settlements that had more people, higher…
- CARTA: Evolving the Construction-Ready Brain with Michael Arbib
Humans construct their physical worlds in part by designing and constructing new tools, habitations, and in due course diverse buildings and, in some cases, towns and cities and construct their symbolic worlds by putting words together to…