A Paleontology Of The Future
The Rest Is Science
Jun 21, 2026 21:00
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What will humanity leave behind?
In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry and VSauce's Michael Stevens explore the traces humans leave behind and what those traces reveal about how we think.
From Tranquility Base, where humanity's first footprints on another world still sit undisturbed in lunar dust, to a three million year old pebble that may represent one of the earliest signs of symbolic thought, they uncover how ordinary objects can become extraordinary windows into our past.
Why would one of our ancestors carry a rock that looked like a face? Who owns the artefacts we leave beyond Earth? And what might future generations learn from our footprints, tools, jokes, habits, and settlements scattered across the Solar System?
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Attribution for images used, no changes have been made.
W. Bulach - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Jerzy Strzelecki - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Rakot13 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
Museum of Human Evolution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Robert G. Bednarik - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
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