Would our ancestors have benefited from early neanderthals making fire?

On this episode

About this episode

400 thousand years ago our early human cousins dropped a lighter in a field in the East of England; evidence that was uncovered this week and suggests that early neanderthals might have made fire 350 thousand years earlier than we previously thought. Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes is honorary researcher 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 it breeding with their wild relatives? Dr William Perry from Cardiff University thinks this could help the endangered wild Atlantic salmon recover it’s numbers. And…