Start the Week

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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Start the Week: Homo Sapiens +/-

Homo Sapiens +/-

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Homo Sapiens +/-

Tom Sutcliffe with Sebastian Faulks, Ludovic Slimak and Lauren Gunderson.

Sebastian Faulks, Ludovic Slimak and Lauren Gunderson explore the differences and connections between humans, Neanderthals and AI, with Tom Sutcliffe.

The French archaeologist Ludovic Slimak has spent three decades uncovering evidence of ancient human life. In The Naked Neanderthal (translated by David Watson) he explores the last great extinction of a humanity that died out at the very moment Homo Sapiens expanded across the earth. 

The ingenuity, compassion and cruelty of Homo Sapiens are at the centre of Sebastian Faulks’s new novel, The Seventh Son. As scientists develop methods to genetically alter the human race, ethical questions arise, as do questions about how humans respond to difference.

The American playwright Lauren Gunderson interrogates our relationship with AI in her new play, Anthropology, at the Hampstead Theatre, London (to 14th October). When Angie goes missing, presumed dead, her grieving sister Merril assembles the digital footprint she left behind, and builds herself a digital simulation.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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