Hodja on Everything

This episode explores a time when Homo sapiens was only one of several human species, meeting and interbreeding with other human lineages, and asks what this complex evolutionary family can tell us about what it really meant to be human.

This episode explores how one upright ape became a planet-changing species, from bipedalism, helpless babies and cumulative culture to humanity’s ecological impact — before looking back at the extraordinary journey from the origins of life to ourselves.

This episode explores the surprisingly political lives of primates, from hierarchy, alliances and reconciliation to social learning — and asks how much of human politics began long before humans invented politics.

This episode explores the surprisingly complicated biology of reproduction, from sexual selection and parental investment to wildly different numbers of offspring — and why how long an animal lives is closely connected to how it keeps its lineage alive.

This episode explores how ants, slime moulds and fungi create remarkably complex systems without central control — revealing how life can become far more than the sum of its parts, or indeed, its ants.

This episode looks beyond the charismatic animals that dominate our idea of life, exploring plants, fungi, insects and microscopic creatures — and asking why we keep overlooking the organisms quietly running much of the planet.

This episode explores the hidden and extraordinary sides of life on Earth, from dark taxa and deep-ocean ecosystems to animals that regenerate, reverse their life cycles, survive extreme conditions and occasionally behave as though biology were merely a set of suggestions.

This episode explores the five great mass extinctions that repeatedly reshaped life on Earth, from the Great Dying to the asteroid that ended the age of the non-avian dinosaurs — and asks whether humanity may now be causing the sixth.

This episode explores the rise of dinosaurs, their surprising evolution into birds, and why the pigeon outside your window is technically a living dinosaur.

This episode explores how evolution works without a plan, from natural selection and common ancestry to living fossils — and why nature keeps reinventing the crab.