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

So we're gonna trace that history out a bit and then focus on primate and then human evolution.

So let's pick up with the Cynodonts.

So the Cynodonts are a clade of therapsids, which are in turn are a clade of synapsids, as I mentioned.

They first appeared in the late Permian and diversified during the Triassic, but stayed fairly small throughout the the Mesozoic period in terms of like diversity and number of species.

It's thought that cynodonts had quite a lot of characteristics of modern mammals, although they acquired those sort of progressively, becoming more mammal-like over the over the course of the Mesozoic.

So m cynodonts are thought to have had fur.

There's evidence for nerve passages for sensory whiskers, and whiskers are thought to be associated with fur.

By the early Triassic, uh they had developed a number of other mammalian characteristics including

long but slender tails compared to the typically thicker tails of many reptiles, distinct lumbar vertebrae as compared to the um thoracic vertebrae, uh as well as sagittal skull crest.

So the the um shape of the skull is one thing that differentiates the cynodonts uh quite noticeably from the their synapsid ancestors, like Dimetrodon for example, which still have fairly

typical reptilian characteristics of their skull.

So a number of the important changes are the development of uh differentiated teeth, so heterodontism it's called.

Um and that's thought to be associated with the diversification of diets of the um uh of the cynodonts, which uh so so originally the um ancestral forms ate meat and the teeth are mostly just for sort of grabbing, gripping and tearing.

Not actually for chewing.

Most of the large synapsids, uh like early synapsids as well as the carnivore carnivorous dinosaurs uh didn't chew their food very much.

The development of chewing was something that happened uh well it evolved multiple times, but in the cynodont lineage it's associated with heterodontism, so a wider range of dietary options, um, such as insects, fruits, and uh eventually as well other plant matter.

And the

That then necessitating the development of different types of teeth, which are specialized for different types of chewing and different um different diets.

Chewing also necessitates stronger jaw muscles, and so you see the progressive development in the transition of the

Early synapsed skull right through to the

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