This scaffolding has seen us go from being just another African ape, to being a globally distributed, technologically entangled species, richly networked and socially organized at a planetary scale, with vast cumulative cultural knowledge at our disposal. This evolutionary and historical trajectory has also seen us develop increasing capacities for altering ecosystems, other species and ourselves. Today, in the Anthropocene epoch, we hold the planet’s future in our hands.

Our Online Project

This project aims to reach a broad online audience of researchers, students and the informed public. It will bring together not only scholars across disciplines ranging from archaeology, anthropology and genomics to evolutionary biology, palaeoecology and medicine, but also those at the forefront of engaging with policy makers, media and the public. The series seeks to explore diverse topics surrounding the human niche, including gene-culture coevolution, domestication, ecosystem engineering, disease ecology, urban evolution and the human-technology interface.