Episodes
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When The Atlantic Ripped Open A Supercontinent
S6 E21 - 10m 21s
While the eruptions of the volcanoes along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge usually don't trouble us, their birth was once responsible for ripping a supercontinent apart and creating the Atlantic Ocean that we know today.
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The Second Time Sponges Took Over The World
S6 E20 - 8m 4s
Researchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past…a time when the first-ever mass extinction may have turned Planet Earth into Sponge World.
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No Single Cradle of Humankind
S6 E19 - 10m 46s
It would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.
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The Hazy Evolution of Cannabis
S6 E18 - 10m 18s
How did such a strange plant like cannabis come to be in the first place? When and where did we first domesticate it? And why oh why does it get us high?
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What Will Earth Be Like 300 Million Years From Now?
S6 E17 - 9m 34s
We spend a lot of time here on Eons looking backwards into deep time, visiting ancient chapters of our planet’s history. But this time, we’re taking a look towards the deep future. After all, the story is far from over. Here is what’s coming up next on planet Earth.
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What Was The Earliest Surgery?
S6 E16 - 7m 59s
When did practicing medicine - in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) - become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our tendency to heal one another might have been with us for even longer than we've been human.
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How Snake Venom Sparked An Evolutionary Arms Race
S6 E15 - 9m 11s
For some, the rise and spread of venomous elapids was just another challenge to adapt to. For others, it was a catastrophe of almost apocalyptic proportions. And we humans are no exception, because it seems that when elapids slithered onto the ecological scene, not even our ancestors were safe…
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Why Is It So Hard to Tell the Sex of a Dinosaur?
S6 E14 - 12m 7s
While we think we know a lot about dinosaurs – like how they moved and what they ate – for a long time, we haven’t been able to ID one seemingly basic thing about their biology... Which are males and which are females?
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Animals Are Older Than We Thought
S6 E13 - 11m 57s
What are animal-like fossils doing in rocks a billion years old, and what does that mean for our understanding of their evolution and geologic time itself? Turns out, there might've been a long, slow-burning fuse that ultimately ignited the Cambrian Explosion.
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Our Most Mysterious Extinct Cousins
S6 E12 - 9m 41s
There was a group of hominins, those creatures more closely related to us than to chimpanzees, that did take a different, parallel journey from our ancestors. Our paths ran beside each other - and potentially even crossed at times - but while ours led us here, theirs led to extinction. What happened to Paranthropus and what can their fate tell us about our past?
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How Ancient Microbes Rode Bug Bits Out to Sea
S6 E11 - 8m 42s
Between 535 and 520 million years ago, a new kind of biological litter began collecting in the ancient oceans of the Cambrian period. Exoskeletons helped early arthropods expand in huge numbers throughout the world’s oceans. And tiny exoskeleton fragments may have allowed some of the most important microbes in the planet’s history to set sail out into the open ocean and change the world forever.
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Why Only Earth Has Fire
S6 E10 - 10m 45s
Earth isn’t the only watery planet in the known universe, but it is the only fiery planet. The sun is mostly hydrogen undergoing nuclear fusion, not fire. And on other planets magma from volcanoes and lightning are also not fire. To get fire, it took billions of years of photosynthesis, which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.
Extras + Features
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A Quick Introduction to Eons
S1 - 1m 28s
Join hosts Hank Green, Kallie Moore, and Blake de Pastino as they take you on a journey through the history of life on Earth. From the dawn of life in the Archaean Eon through the Mesozoic Era — the so-called “Age of Dinosaurs” -- right up to the end of the most recent Ice Age. The evolutionary history of mammals including humans and other modern species is explored with these amazing paleontology
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