Animals: tamed, exploited and resurrected
Alice Roberts, Britt Wray and Gaia Vince discuss our relationship with the animal kingdom.
Start the Week · BBC Radio 4
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Show Notes
Amol Rajan discusses the uneasy interaction between the animal kingdom and humans. The anthropologist Alice Roberts looks back to the moment hunter-gatherers changed their relationship with other species and began to tame them, paving the way for our civilisation. Gaia Vince visits the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica where local people have found a way to both exploit and protect a natural resource, the olive ridley sea turtle. Re-introducing native species can be fraught with difficulties: John Ewen was part of the team who successfully re-introduced the hihi bird to New Zealand, but can lessons learnt with songbirds help with schemes to bring back wolves, lynx and beavers? And resurrection science may be the stuff of films like Jurassic Park, but it is also an exciting - and potentially dangerous - new field of study. Britt Wray offers a warning about the risks of de-extinction.
Producer: Katy Hickman.