SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human

Being Afghan in America: In the Field with Morwari Zafar

Dec 18, 2018

How does an immigrant become an American? How does anyone join any group? SAPIENS host Esteban Gomez shares the story of Dr. Morwari Zafar, a researcher who has studied the changes in her own community of Afghan-Americans in Fremont, California, in the wake of 9-11. From the first major wave of immigration in the late...

What’s the Cost of Quinoa?

Dec 4, 2018

SAPIENS host Jen Shannon goes on a mission to find out how quinoa travels from farmers’ fields in Huanoquite, Peru, to markets in Lima and the U.S. She discovers quinoa’s complicated past and present: a bloody civil war that shook the nation, the chefs who tried to use food as a racial reconciliation project,...

How to Care for the Dead

Nov 20, 2018

Scientists have thought about burial—the act of interring a dead body—as a distinctly human behavior. So what happened when a group of paleoanthropologists discovered a primitive hominid that may have entombed its dead?

And how do people respond when they are unable to find and care for the remains of their loved...

BONUS: A Conversation with Carl Zimmer about DNA, Identity, and Heredity

Nov 13, 2018

Surprise!

As a special holiday treat, the SAPIENS team is presenting this unedited conversation between SAPIENS host Chip Colwell and acclaimed science journalist Carl Zimmer about DNA, identity, and heredity.

This conversation was previously excerpted in our episode “Is Your DNA You?” It took place in front of a...

Is Space a Human Place?

Nov 6, 2018

From space junk and the International Space Station to Elon Musk and SpaceX, space is becoming a more human place. What will it mean for us to live among the stars? SAPIENS host Jen Shannon probes the nascent field of space archaeology and looks to the mystery of exoplanets for answers.

Alice Gorman is a senior...