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Crash Course Big History: Why Human Ancestry Matters (10:26)

Key Ideas

As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.

Key Ideas

Think about the following questions as you watch the video


  1. 01:16 How and why did the human population change over the last 200,000 years?
  2. 04:10 When some humans left Africa 64,000 years ago, how and where did they spread across the globe for the next 50,000 years—at least in theory?
  3. 05:42 What is the variable that determines skin color, and how genetically different does it make people?
  4. 07:07 Why do humans seem prone to fighting each other and emphasizing our differences, and how might modern humans avoid this?
  5. 09:55 How is evolutionary “pseudoscience” dangerous?