BBC Inside Science – Would our ancestors have benefited from early neanderthals making fire?
Available for 34 days
400,000 years ago, our first human cousins dropped a lighter in a field in eastern England; evidence that was discovered this week suggests that the first Neanderthals could have made fire 350,000 years earlier than previously thought. Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Universities of Cambridge and Liverpool and author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. She explains what this new discovery could mean for our own ancestors. Should we genetically modify our farmed salmon to prevent them from breeding with their wild relatives? Dr William Perry from Cardiff University believes this could help endangered wild Atlantic salmon recover their population. And Lizzie Gibney, Nature’s senior physics reporter, joins Tom Whipple to dig deeper into new science released this week. Think you know space? Visit bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to the Open University to try the Open University Space Quiz.
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