Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine digs into our archive of shows to rebroadcast an edited version that originally aired on January 17, 2008. Our guest was John Hawks, anthropologist and evolutionist at UW-Madison. With his research into various genetic sequences of the human genome and at times, the use of some convenient mummified DNA, he […]
Violence (Rebroadcast From Feb. 2, 2006)
Tonight the Perpetual Notion Machine rebroadcasts a show that originally aired on Feb. 2, 2006. Distinguished professor of anthropology Neil Whitehead was our guest. Generally, Neil studied indigenous peoples in the isolated regions of the Amazon rainforest, and their often brutal tribal practices. Thus, he was interested in the human nature of violence, and wrote […]
What We Did In Bed: A Horizontal History
We think of our beds, and our bedrooms, as the most intimate, personal part of our house. The bedroom is the room that is closed off if we have guests in our house, and inviting someone into your bedroom has certain… connotations. But it hasn’t always been thus. Throughout human history, beds were often more […]
What’s New in the Science of What’s Old
In 1879, German naturalist Ernst Haeckel drew his version of a “Genealogical Tree of Humanity” to show how human beings are related to other species of animals on the earth. The tall, slender, tree rendered by Haeckel has a distinct hierarchy: “monera” or single-celled animals at the bottom, mammals at the top, and at the […]
