James Fodor

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3,084 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Aug

James Fodor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Science of Everything Podcast · Episode 162: Human Evolution · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 162.

Human Evolution.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So, this will be the concluding episode in our series on the evolution of animals.

So, recommended pre-listening here will be the previous episode, 161 Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Reptiles.

And unsurprisingly, we're going to be talking about the evolution of Homo sapiens, beginning with the cynodonts of the early Mesozoic and

surveying their evolution through the development of mammals, primates, and then humans.

And I'll also focus on some of the most distinctive traits of Homo sapiens, including bipedalism and our large brains, as well as talking a bit about tool usage.

With that being said, let's get started and pick up where we left off with the synapsid line uh in in the previous episode.

So I I talked previously about the the split of the amniote line into three the diapsids, which are the reptiles, the synapsids, which gave rise to the mammalian line, and then the parareptiles, which became extinct at the end of the Triassic.

We're picking up from where we left off there, I talked about uh in the previous

the previous episode how there were many different types of synapsids called uh pelicosaurs, uh which lived in the Permian and into the Triassic, uh, which are sometimes called mammal like reptiles, although they're actually they're not reptiles.

And then I also talked about the therapsids, which was a line of kind of transitional forms which branched off uh in the late Permian and eventually gave rise to the mammalian line.

We'll we'll talk about that trajectory.

I also talked about the cynodonts.

So cynont the cynodonts are a branch of the therapsids, in turn a branch of the synapsids, which which gave rise to the mammalian line.

And um in the previous episode I mentioned how during most of the Mesozoic the

Terrestrial uh ecosystems were dominated by large, mostly reptile forms, so particularly the dinosaurs.

And um there were still cynodonts living during the Mesozoic period, but most of them were fairly small, sort of insectivores, shrew-like animals, and it wasn't until the

end of the uh Cretaceous with the the mass extinction of the the dinosaurs and other life forms that the mammalian line then became dominant.

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