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Speaker 1: S T L I T E dot com. All Right, everybody,
Speaker 1: it's finally half and a half years of talking about it.
Speaker 1: We have our name. We have Neanderthal experts in the room.
Speaker 1: This is the white. This is the white, my white whale.
Speaker 1: This is this is my you know, my Moby Dick story.
Speaker 1: I've said for years I want to talk to some
Speaker 1: people that actually know something about Neanderthals.
Speaker 2: And here you are these Okay, they have a book.
Speaker 1: It's well first names, Dimitra, Papa Gianni is how it's spelled,
Speaker 1: Papa Yanni, Dimitra, Papayanni and Mike Morse. And they have
Speaker 1: a book that's in its third edition. So the Neanderthals
Speaker 1: Rediscovered how modern science is rewriting their story. It's in
Speaker 1: its third edition it was originally published in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: They were just explaining to me that, oh, sorry, I
Speaker 1: got that written right, or sorry my fault originally publishing
Speaker 1: two thousand and thirteen originally. But and this is part
Speaker 1: of partly why you're here, our understanding of Neanderthal culture
Speaker 1: has changed so much that in that time you've had
Speaker 1: to really overhaul the book and make major changes. Right, So,
Speaker 1: something that happened a long time ago, our understanding of
Speaker 1: it has changed so much that it's caused you to
Speaker 1: constantly need to go in and update your work.
Speaker 3: At some point, Demitra said, we really need to update
Speaker 3: this every three years if we want to stay current.
Speaker 3: It's hard to do that, but you know we're doing
Speaker 3: the best weekend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's it's so rapidly evolving. And part of
Speaker 1: the reason I want to talk to you about Neanderthal
Speaker 1: is not just in my lifetime, but in the last
Speaker 1: few years, I've started to feel like I had this
Speaker 1: image of Neanderthal culture and in a minute, I want
Speaker 1: you to explain what Neanderthal is, but I've had this
Speaker 1: image of Neanderthal culture and the way it's portrayed in
Speaker 1: like cartoons and things. You just picture people with big
Speaker 1: clubs and they're hitting each other with clubs and dragging.
Speaker 2: Their knuckles along the ground.
Speaker 1: And then I would read just as a just an
Speaker 1: interested party reading common news sites, I would read like, oh,
Speaker 1: they seem that they had art. Oh perhaps they had jewelry.
Speaker 1: Perhaps they made it with humans. You know, they were divers,
Speaker 1: they were they were collecting shellfish, they suffered from swimmers
Speaker 1: year whatever. And I don't know how much of all
Speaker 1: that is true, but it's just been that I started
Speaker 1: to visualize them less like some kind of glorified ape
Speaker 1: and more like a you know, they just became more
Speaker 1: human to the part where I could almost picture that
Speaker 1: that's something I had never thought of before, that they
Speaker 1: were there was personalities and right, and so as my
Speaker 1: understanding has changed, I just wanted to have someone in
Speaker 1: who could speak to like, who really were they?
Speaker 2: What happened to them?
Speaker 1: What did they do? You know if I saw one
Speaker 1: across the room, would I instantly know that I was
Speaker 1: buy something different? This is what I want to talk about,
Speaker 1: this is why you're here. But first off, and I
Speaker 1: don't care any of these questions. I don't care who
Speaker 1: answers it but will we say Neanderthal What is that?
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 4: They were our answers, stores But they were part of
Speaker 4: our answers, part of what came before us as humans.
Speaker 4: They were essentially an offshoot of our direct evolutionary line,
Speaker 4: a side branch of which a little bit remains in us.
Speaker 4: For most of their part, they lived at the same
Speaker 4: time as our ancestors, but in different parts of the world.
Speaker 4: Later on they met and they were mostly in Europe,
Speaker 4: but again later in their span of existence in the
Speaker 4: Old World, expanded towards Asia, towards the Middle East and Siberia,
Speaker 4: and they chronologically what we call pre Neanderthals, or the
Speaker 4: earliest forms of Neanderthals, could be going back as far
Speaker 4: as half a million years. But when we start seeing
Speaker 4: kind of Neanderthals with the features of that we identify
Speaker 4: as Neanderthals, is closer to about three hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: thousand years, give or take.
Speaker 5: And they.
Speaker 4: Disappeared from Europe let's say around forty thousand years in
Speaker 4: the case there is give or take in new dates
Speaker 4: and so on. So this is the times fun that
Speaker 4: we are talking about. In terms of their morphology, they
Speaker 4: were shorter, than us, a little bit shorter than ours,
Speaker 4: and bulky built. They were some They had some distinct
Speaker 4: features like the short, shorter than us limbs proportionally also
Speaker 4: smaller than us. And they had big barrel shaped chests.
Speaker 4: And their faces were if you take one of our faces,
Speaker 4: you kind of pull it forward, so you will have
Speaker 4: this part sticking out farther. Ah, they their noses were
Speaker 4: sticking out farther. Their brow ridges were bigger. They didn't
Speaker 4: have chins, so can you kind of imagine a.
Speaker 5: More bird like profile.
Speaker 4: They didn't have chins. No, we don't even know why
Speaker 4: we have chins.
Speaker 2: It's not clear why.
Speaker 5: We don't know.
Speaker 4: There are many theories of why we have chins and
Speaker 4: what they do. But they did not have chins.
Speaker 1: That yeah, uh, anotho could kick a normal person like
Speaker 1: a nanothal could beat up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, probably an animal woman could beat up a modern
Speaker 4: human man.
Speaker 2: Just across the board like big strong.
Speaker 4: No not probably not across the board, depending on their lifestyle.
Speaker 6: But they were very muscular, very strong bones.
Speaker 1: I noticed you say, Neander tal Yes, we're going to
Speaker 1: give you the long answer to this. Please, what do
Speaker 1: you do? What do you go with? So?
Speaker 3: I grew up saying Neanderthal because I grew up in
Speaker 3: the United States where that's normal. Then we lived in
Speaker 3: the UK for fifteen years where everyone says neander Tal.
Speaker 3: My view is they're both right. It doesn't know Neanderthal
Speaker 3: is going to come back and correct us, so we're good.
Speaker 3: But I think it's worth going to the etymology.
Speaker 1: Please, because there's a valley in Germany and exactly they
Speaker 1: call that the Neanderthal Valley or something.
Speaker 3: So the German word for valley is tall. Oh, and
Speaker 3: originally it was spelled with the thh, but the h
Speaker 3: was silent, so in German it's tall. And this is
Speaker 3: something that we all should know because virtually everyone watching
Speaker 3: this says says the German word for valley every day.
Speaker 3: And now I'm going to go into the etymology. So
Speaker 3: Neanderthals came from the neander Valley. That's where they were,
Speaker 3: That's where the major discovery was made. And that valley
Speaker 3: was named after a guy named Joachim Neander. He wrote hymns,
Speaker 3: and so they named the valley after him, the neander Valley,
Speaker 3: the Neanderthal. There was another tall there's another valley called
Speaker 3: the Joachim's Tall where they had a mint, and so
Speaker 3: the money that was made from the Joachims tall was
Speaker 3: called the Joachims Tallers, and that got shortened to taller.
Speaker 3: Oh and so that's where the that's where the word
Speaker 3: dollar comes from.
Speaker 1: Oh really, okay, so we say.
Speaker 3: Dollar, we don't say thaler. You can say Neanderthal if
Speaker 3: you want. It's spelled with an H in English. I
Speaker 3: think it's easier to say Neanderthal.
Speaker 1: One.
Speaker 3: The parint is once you start saying it one way,
Speaker 3: it's very hard to change.
Speaker 2: Once we were talking change two times.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3: Once we were talking with a geneticist and we were
Speaker 3: saying Neanderthal and Denise Evin and he was saying Neanderthal
Speaker 3: and Dennis Savin and we understood each other. No one
Speaker 3: was correcting. It was fine. It doesn't matter how you
Speaker 3: pronounce these things.
Speaker 2: Got it.
Speaker 1: Good to get that cleared up.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're fine.
Speaker 1: So over the whatever. Since the days of twenty three
Speaker 1: and twenty three and me came out and any person
Speaker 1: could send in you know, saliva and get a genetic
Speaker 1: profile of themselves, people would even call it, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I did I twenty three and me myself, I did
Speaker 1: twenty three and mes whatever, and all of a sudden
Speaker 1: everyone is talking about what percent nand or fall they
Speaker 1: are or it would give it to you like less
Speaker 1: than average, more than average. I was disappointed to see that.
Speaker 1: I'm I think less than average. I was disappointed to
Speaker 1: see what do you guys buy that? And what are
Speaker 1: people really saying when they say that? Right when people
Speaker 1: look and they get their profile, they see that they're
Speaker 1: blank percent of Neanderthal descent.
Speaker 2: What are we saying?
Speaker 4: So it's it's probably it's accurate. So the percentage you
Speaker 4: were given, the personage I was given as I'm sure
Speaker 4: it's accurate. There are other things in the twenty three
Speaker 4: and meters and this kind of sequencing that I'm not
Speaker 4: so comfortable with with the conclusions.
Speaker 5: You know, I'm like thirty percent Italian.
Speaker 4: It doesn't really work this way, but the Neanderthal bit
Speaker 4: is one of the most reliable things they What it
Speaker 4: means though, is basically that we all, all of us
Speaker 4: who have our answers stores outside Sub Saharan Africa have
Speaker 4: a component of neanderital DNA. But my, let's say three percent,
Speaker 4: My three percent of nanatal DNA is not necessarily the
Speaker 4: same as yours or his and if you pull them
Speaker 4: all together you can actually you can actually reconstruct about
Speaker 4: At this point it's about I think seventy percent of
Speaker 4: nanatal DNA. So we have different bits of nanatal DNA
Speaker 4: in US I see, and for most of it we
Speaker 4: don't know what it does or if it does anything.
Speaker 4: And essentially, I mean, it doesn't mean all that much.
Speaker 4: It simply means that some a little bit of our
Speaker 4: ancestors lives in US because they interpret with us. And
Speaker 4: actually even even modern humans who come from some Saharan
Speaker 4: Africa they also have a tiny bit of nanatal DNA.
Speaker 4: That's one of the very recent findings. We thought that
Speaker 4: they had none. They had a tiny bit because at
Speaker 4: some point there was migration back to Africa and intermixing.
Speaker 5: But it's different.
Speaker 4: So the big genetic difference in US in modern humans
Speaker 4: generally is that everyone who is from sub Saharan Africa
Speaker 4: has much bigger genetic diversity than the rest of us
Speaker 4: and a tiny bit of nanital DNA. But the big
Speaker 4: story about them genetically is that they are much more
Speaker 4: diverse than us because we as a species developed in
Speaker 4: sub Saharan Africa. And it's a whole different story how
Speaker 4: we're where and when. But at some or at different points,
Speaker 4: it wasn't only one point. There were several probably waves
Speaker 4: of leaving Africa, some less successful than others. But basically
Speaker 4: you have what you call a bottleneck event. Imagine that
Speaker 4: you have the big bottle in Africa and then just
Speaker 4: a segment of that population leaves. And this is what
Speaker 4: the modern humans, as Homo sapiens, who come from outside
Speaker 4: sub Saharan Africa, we are much genetically diverse than the
Speaker 4: sub Saharan Africa much, yes, much less diverse genetically and
Speaker 4: because of us, the stores mixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Speaker 4: We have that little bit of Neanderthal DNA. For most
Speaker 4: of it, we don't know what it does. And for
Speaker 4: most of DNA, we don't know what they like. If
Speaker 4: you take a specific gene, we still don't know. For
Speaker 4: some of them, we don't know they make cause this
Speaker 4: disease or that. But generally we're not yet at the
Speaker 4: point we'll say, oh, this gene does this, We don't
Speaker 4: know yet. It's like a language that we cannot quite
Speaker 4: read yet.
Speaker 3: I think there's a there's a bigger question about like
Speaker 3: are you above average or below average Neanderthal. And to me,
Speaker 3: the the big answer is most of the world outside
Speaker 3: of Africa is about the same. It's like two percent
Speaker 3: plus or minus a little bit. I mean originally when
Speaker 3: when they started, when you when you first could send
Speaker 3: your DNA off to get its sequence, it would be
Speaker 3: between one and four percent, and you could get excited
Speaker 3: by that. When they've refined it, it's downs it's mostly
Speaker 3: towards two percent.
Speaker 7: And everywhere around the world outside of Africa, yeah, which
Speaker 7: which to me tells an amazing story, which is that
Speaker 7: it's you know, when that bottleneck of Homo sapiens left Africa,
Speaker 7: they must have intermixed very quickly with.
Speaker 3: Neanderthals, because you know, yeah, Europe is not that different
Speaker 3: from East Asia for example, or you know, for or
Speaker 3: even the people that made it to the Americans. It's
Speaker 3: all about the same percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
Speaker 1: That that a little bit surprised me because I would
Speaker 1: picture as humans are spreading around the world, I would
Speaker 1: picture that some bands of people, some clans, social or
Speaker 1: whatever social organization structures there were. I would picture that
Speaker 1: some would go in whatever direction and have a different
Speaker 1: level of running, a different level of integration with Neanderthals
Speaker 1: and then carry that off in whatever direction they went,
Speaker 1: especially people that went out and colonized islands that I
Speaker 1: would just guess that if you went around the world,
Speaker 1: you'd find much greater concentrations of you know whatever in
Speaker 1: some area because those people that became those people had
Speaker 1: just a different experience.
Speaker 2: I think that does that Does that make any sense
Speaker 2: at all?
Speaker 3: Well, the numbers were so small back then, so this
Speaker 3: so we went to see this geneticist, Josh Aky okay,
Speaker 3: and I don't quite know what these numbers mean, but
Speaker 3: he said the Homo sapien breeding population was about ten thousand.
Speaker 3: Don't but so that doesn't mean there were ten thousand
Speaker 3: human beings, but in terms of like who is of
Speaker 3: an age and ability to reproduce, and the Neanderthal breeding
Speaker 3: population they think was about one thousand at the time
Speaker 3: that they met, so it was about ten to one.
Speaker 3: And in fact, from the from very early on, if
Speaker 3: they you know, the kind of hybrids that they find
Speaker 3: have are modern humans with about ten percent Neanderthal DNA.
Speaker 3: So if as they're coming out of Africa they're part
Speaker 3: of the same breeding population, then that ten percent kind
Speaker 3: of spreads around to everyone, and then it's been slowly
Speaker 3: getting whittled down.
Speaker 6: It's like it's being selected outood.
Speaker 3: So I mean another geneticists used the term toxic, that
Speaker 3: Neanderthal DNA is toxic.
Speaker 1: It it that's a brand. That's a branding problem.
Speaker 6: You know, as life goes on, we have less and
Speaker 6: less of it?
Speaker 1: Got it? Got it?
Speaker 2: Do you? How do you imagine? How do you imagine?
Speaker 2: What is the interaction? I mean, I know we don't know.
Speaker 2: I know, I know we don't.
Speaker 1: Know, But how do how do we imagine it was?
Speaker 2: The interaction?
Speaker 1: Was it around that Neanderthals are kidnapping Homo sapient females,
Speaker 1: Is that they're living in bliss, they're living in mixed communities.
Speaker 1: There's sort of a there's sort of a warfare element
Speaker 1: to it of taking captives and breeding with those captives.
Speaker 1: What are some of the like what are some of
Speaker 1: the guesses? What are some of the guesses of or
Speaker 1: they go like, Wow, these people are amazing looking. I'd
Speaker 1: love to breathe one of them.
Speaker 4: I think we can, I think we can safely say
Speaker 4: that there wasn't only one scenario. Okay, and you know,
Speaker 4: people met and it could be a whole range of
Speaker 4: things from a chance encounter or a chance mating episode two.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't say living together because culturally we don't see
Speaker 4: that level. But maybe, actually, now that I think of it,
Speaker 4: there has. You probably referred to a kind of a
Speaker 4: recent story just a few months ago about a sex bias.
Speaker 4: Now the sex bias in that case, they mean it
Speaker 4: basically how sexes are represented in the DNA, not.
Speaker 1: Necessarily primarily male neanderthals breeding with female No.
Speaker 5: No, no no.
Speaker 4: So the bias could be that you had more Neanderthal
Speaker 4: men interbreeding with more modern human women. But it could
Speaker 4: also be that the Neanderthal female DNA was filtered out
Speaker 4: because it was not you know what you called toxic
Speaker 4: got it.
Speaker 1: So it's not conclusive to me.
Speaker 3: The main takeaway of all this, and it's not just humans,
Speaker 3: but it's all mammals, is that they're just they're very
Speaker 3: promiscuous like this if you can imagine sexual combinations that
Speaker 3: are happening somewhere in nature, and so maybe it shouldn't
Speaker 3: have been a surprise. It was a big surprise when
Speaker 3: it turned out we carry Neanderthal DNA in us, but
Speaker 3: maybe it just shouldn't have been maybe you know, there's
Speaker 3: just mixing.
Speaker 1: Everywhere, got it. Yeah, like our r being shocked about
Speaker 1: it was sort of looking at human exceptionalism and not
Speaker 1: considering what you see in the in the broader community
Speaker 1: of mammals in general.
Speaker 2: Do you they had a language? You think they were talking?
Speaker 6: Absolutely?
Speaker 2: How complex?
Speaker 3: That's that's one of those words that So for for years,
Speaker 3: the idea was that what you know, the question is
Speaker 3: what makes us special? And it's really disturbing that you've
Speaker 3: got these really strong, you know, Neanderthal's really strong, kind
Speaker 3: of strange faces, slightly different bodies living about the same
Speaker 3: time that Homo sapiens were. But but we've got to
Speaker 3: explain what makes us special. So for years the idea was, well,
Speaker 3: we have complex language and they must not have. And
Speaker 3: then well that it turns out they did have language, Well,
Speaker 3: ours was more complex. I just think it's one of
Speaker 3: those words to hide behind, like we're still special. I
Speaker 3: tell you we're still special. Yeah, you know we, I
Speaker 3: mean we at some point we need to get into
Speaker 3: the whole. There's a whole theory, the social brain hypothesis
Speaker 3: and which which is a theory that explains when lange
Speaker 3: which should have first appeared, and it kind of predates
Speaker 3: both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals according to that theory. Well
Speaker 3: we'll get into that, but there's this idea we still
Speaker 3: need to keep something for ourselves. And yes, modern humans,
Speaker 3: Homo sapiens do stuff that Neanderthals didn't do. It doesn't
Speaker 3: mean that you're going to see that in language, perhaps,
Speaker 3: but not necessarily.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the word complex language doesn't that doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 3: Well it to me, it's it's a way to hide
Speaker 3: behind we're but but our language is better than their language,
Speaker 3: Like because for a long time as they didn't have language,
Speaker 3: we have we're the only species that has language. Well
Speaker 3: it turns out we're not so, but ours we're the
Speaker 3: only species that has this really really complex language.
Speaker 2: Well how do we know they how do you know
Speaker 2: they had language?
Speaker 1: Do you? I mean? Like, so let's look, if you're
Speaker 1: looking at bones, how do you how do you know
Speaker 1: that they were talking to each other?
Speaker 3: Because the bones that you're looking at, well, the bones
Speaker 3: that you're looking at are the skulls and its brain
Speaker 3: size is the big thing. But within the brain is
Speaker 3: pre prefrontal cortex and so this part so yeah, so
Speaker 3: there is so there.
Speaker 6: Let me just rewind.
Speaker 3: There was a day that when Demetro was a post
Speaker 3: doc at Southampton in the UK, she came home one
Speaker 3: day and she's like, Mike, I saw this guy, Robin
Speaker 3: Dunbar speak and he explains everything, and I'm like okay,
Speaker 3: and you were just like bursting with excitement. It's like, okay,
Speaker 3: what does he explain? You're like, why do people sing
Speaker 3: at soccer matches? Why do people sing in church? Why
Speaker 3: do we have language? What's our social organization? It all
Speaker 3: comes together in this one big theory. So here's the thing. So,
Speaker 3: so the theory is that so prefrontal cortex is correlated
Speaker 3: with group size. So if if you go if you
Speaker 3: look at chimpanzees, which is a nice proxy for our
Speaker 3: ancest there's pre you know, pre Homo, our oldest ancestors
Speaker 3: from six million years ago. They live in groups of
Speaker 3: fifty to fifty five individuals. So how do they keep
Speaker 3: the group together, how do they know that they're in
Speaker 3: that group?
Speaker 6: They do grooming.
Speaker 3: They spend a lot of the day, you know, picking
Speaker 3: little insects off each other's backs. If you've ever had
Speaker 3: someone rub your back, it's incredibly relaxing. You know, tho's
Speaker 3: brain changes, there's enderfins. You feel very close to this person.
Speaker 3: So in chimpanzees, they groom each other to the point
Speaker 3: that they all feel like one unit together.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 3: So as your prefrontal cortex grows, as the brain gets bigger,
Speaker 3: the group size gets bigger. So we today have a
Speaker 3: natural group size of one hundred and fifty, which is
Speaker 3: called the Dunbar number. And this and the incredible there's
Speaker 3: so many incredible things about the Dunbar number. My favorite
Speaker 3: is that it's a it's a hard stop at one fifty.
Speaker 3: So if you have like a group of one hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty one, it will break up into two groups.
Speaker 3: It's just our brains can't. We don't have the capacity
Speaker 3: for a group larger than one hundred and fifty. And
Speaker 3: so you'll see this in the ways companies are organized,
Speaker 3: the way the military is organized. I once experienced this
Speaker 3: myself when I went to a conference that had one
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty five people there, and after a couple
Speaker 3: of days, you could walk up to anyone in that
Speaker 3: conference and just say, you know, hi, I'm Mike. Here's
Speaker 3: what I'm doing. You know, who are you and you
Speaker 3: could just have the most amazing conversation. The next day
Speaker 3: you would feel like old friends. If there were a
Speaker 3: thousand people at that conference and I walked up to
Speaker 3: someone and said, Hi, I'm Mike, they might think who
Speaker 3: is this guy? You know, like coming up to me
Speaker 3: like this, So we obviously live in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's interesting that the size of the group. It does.
Speaker 2: The size of the group.
Speaker 1: Informs or dictates what would be an appropriate way to
Speaker 1: approach somebody.
Speaker 4: People that you can maintain daily contact with, and that's
Speaker 4: fairly small because you have to.
Speaker 5: You have to.
Speaker 4: You have to think of it in terms of how
Speaker 4: much time, how much of your own time and energy
Speaker 4: you have to spend to maintain that contact. There is
Speaker 4: the bigger group of people that you are in contact
Speaker 4: with regularly, like your friends, but they don't live in
Speaker 4: the same town. Maybe every once a couple of weeks
Speaker 4: you exchange a text message, or there's something like a
Speaker 4: sport sporting event that you suddenly interact with a lot
Speaker 4: for a small number amount of time, and then you
Speaker 4: don't forget about them, but you kind of don't interact
Speaker 4: with them for like a month, but they're still there.
Speaker 4: They're still in your brain that you still spend some
Speaker 4: time with them. And there is the people back then
Speaker 4: when Robin Dunmar wrote this theory that you call the
Speaker 4: Christmas card group the people that the hundred plus that
Speaker 4: you know. You consider them your friends, you consider them
Speaker 4: part of your net work. But you may not even
Speaker 4: talk to them in the year. Still you'll send them.
Speaker 1: A card, yes, your wedding if you have a good budget, So.
Speaker 4: Think of it this way, or if you even in
Speaker 4: a dinner party, if you have a small dinner party
Speaker 4: with four, that's five. If you have a bigger group,
Speaker 4: eventually people will kind of split naturally into smaller groups.
Speaker 4: And the idea is that in an evolutionary sense, though,
Speaker 4: if you project it in an evolutionary sense, you can't
Speaker 4: do the sort of grooming that primates do with a
Speaker 4: group of even fifty people. So what do you do
Speaker 4: instead to maintain those connections? And he says you gossip.
Speaker 4: That's where language comes in. Okay, that instead of spending
Speaker 4: time one on one grooming, you can spend time with
Speaker 4: a bigger group at a time, and you spend that time,
Speaker 4: you know, telling stories, discussing things, gossiping about the people
Speaker 4: and that's how you maintain that network in terms of time.
Speaker 4: Is a more efficient language gives you a more efficient
Speaker 4: way to maintain that network, and then you build other
Speaker 4: things in like you know, now we call it dinner parties.
Speaker 4: Back then it was I killed a big deer. Do
Speaker 4: you want to come over and help me with butchering
Speaker 4: it and take some of the food? And I know
Speaker 4: that you will invite me over when you do the
Speaker 4: same thing, and so so's.
Speaker 3: At some point between the kind of fifty five maximum
Speaker 3: of chimpanzees and one hundred and fifty of us, there
Speaker 3: had to be language to maintain that group size, and
Speaker 3: Robin Dunbar puts it somewhere between a million years ago
Speaker 3: and five hundred thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Do you feel that if you look at the timing
Speaker 1: of humans leaving Africa? Okay, would the timing be that
Speaker 1: if the Neanderthals had a language they spoke Neanderthal, let's say,
Speaker 1: would it have been incomprehensible to Homo sapiens?
Speaker 2: I mean, like, was the right amount of.
Speaker 1: Time gone by that they would have developed these entirely
Speaker 1: different languages?
Speaker 2: And by that, I mean if you look.
Speaker 1: At when when humans were spreading around the world. Europeans
Speaker 1: developed a certain skin tone, language families, right, so that
Speaker 1: when they finally come together with Native Americans all those
Speaker 1: years later, they're coming from a commonplace. When they finally
Speaker 1: re meet, the languages are incomprehensible, The cultures are largely incompatible.
Speaker 2: They look totally different.
Speaker 1: They don't even recon they don't barely recognize each other
Speaker 1: that they have there's a reluctance to even accept them
Speaker 1: as fellow human beings. Right, So, would like Neanderthal language
Speaker 1: out in Western Europe would have been probably something totally
Speaker 1: different than were Homo sapiens spoke when they met.
Speaker 2: They weren't yelling hello.
Speaker 1: Across the valley.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think when we talk about Nanatal language, I
Speaker 4: think we I don't think they had the same old
Speaker 4: Nanators had the same language. I mean, it's completely theoretical now,
Speaker 4: but I can't imagine that people who were not in
Speaker 4: regular contact would speak the exact the same language. They
Speaker 4: probably had something similar to maybe our families of languages,
Speaker 4: or you know, groups that were in western in southwest France,
Speaker 4: we probably had different language from groups in Germany.
Speaker 1: So different Neanderthal communities might have had totally different words.
Speaker 4: From what we know for how language works. Unless you
Speaker 4: are regularly interacting with another group, you wouldn't have the
Speaker 4: same language. I mean even now French and German are
Speaker 4: part both in the European languages and have a relatively
Speaker 4: very recent answerst or common ancestor as languages, but you can't.
Speaker 5: They're not the same.
Speaker 4: I mean, it takes.
Speaker 5: It takes.
Speaker 4: It's it's closer than Greek and German, which also again
Speaker 4: in the European languages, but it takes time to learn it.
Speaker 4: Even if you have like Russian and Creation the closer
Speaker 4: generat in terms of evolution as languages, they're closer together,
Speaker 4: but it's there. You can't just walk from one country
Speaker 4: to the other and just speak as if you know
Speaker 4: you speak their language, it will be easier to understand it,
Speaker 4: if it will be faster to learn it, but it's not.
Speaker 4: I just can't. You know, Neanderthals in Siberia I wouldn't
Speaker 4: speak if they met an an adult in France, they
Speaker 4: wouldn't speak the same.
Speaker 2: That's a good poets. I had a linguist explain that.
Speaker 1: I had a linguist one time say that if you
Speaker 1: had at the time of the American Civil War. If
Speaker 1: at the end of the American Civil War you had
Speaker 1: taken the Mason Dixon Line and built a sort of
Speaker 1: impenetrable wall that prevented communication with people south of the
Speaker 1: Mason Dixon line and people north of the Mason Dixon line,
Speaker 1: he said, in that amount of time, they would now
Speaker 1: not be able to communicate.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it doesn't take a load of time.
Speaker 2: All the words would have gone different.
Speaker 3: Look at it the other way, which is when you're
Speaker 3: talking about hunter gatherers, they're on the move, they're traveling
Speaker 3: a lot, and they're going to run into other people,
Speaker 3: whether it's Neanderthals running into Neanderthals, modern humans running into Neanderthals,
Speaker 3: modern humans running into modern humans. You're going to run
Speaker 3: into other people, and the first thing you have to
Speaker 3: figure out is are these people going to kill us?
Speaker 3: And it's it's kind of it's a human capability to
Speaker 3: make friends and communicate, whether or not you share a language,
Speaker 3: and I think the language can come.
Speaker 6: You know, you can learn each other's languages.
Speaker 3: Later, you can you can embed, you can live with them,
Speaker 3: and you know, after whatever amount of time, there are
Speaker 3: going to be people that that are fluent in both.
Speaker 3: But to me, it's not a question of can we understand.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's like a modern problem. You know if
Speaker 3: I if I travel somewhere, am I going to understand
Speaker 3: the locals? But if you're a hunter gatherer, you're kind
Speaker 3: of doing this all the time.
Speaker 1: I know, language is hard because it's like there's no record,
Speaker 1: there's no record of their words. But let's talk about something.
Speaker 1: There is a record.
Speaker 5: What we do have.
Speaker 4: We have some anatomical stuff like from Neanderthals that we know.
Speaker 4: We know that they could produce sounds and a big
Speaker 4: range of sounds. How it sounded like maybe it was
Speaker 4: more high pitched than ours.
Speaker 3: Really, Yeah, that's yeah, there's squeaky there's big guys with
Speaker 3: squeaky little voice.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because of how.
Speaker 6: That's squeaky little voice, that's that's the theory.
Speaker 5: That's the theory. Yes.
Speaker 4: But I think in terms of you know, if you
Speaker 4: met Ananderdal, of when an Anado met in modern humans,
Speaker 4: they probably it was probably mostly gestures to understand, to
Speaker 4: kind of understand each other and see who who this
Speaker 4: guy is gonna kill me or not? And one side,
Speaker 4: I don't want to talk too much about modern humans
Speaker 4: because then we always did this service to nanadals because
Speaker 4: we always like, oh, you talk about us. But the
Speaker 4: question is, once you move more and you there are
Speaker 4: more people around and you interact with more people, how
Speaker 4: do you signal to them who you are and what
Speaker 4: you are or this is your land or this is
Speaker 4: your river? And that may be where the real the
Speaker 4: advantage of modern humans was because they thought they they
Speaker 4: came up, came up. They used ways that could have
Speaker 4: been kind of calling cards of who they are. It
Speaker 4: could be I'm wearing this necklace that has shells from uh,
Speaker 4: this coast, you know, it could be the Mediterranean coast.
Speaker 4: It could be the Black Sea coast. Or I have this,
Speaker 4: you know, this figurines, this portable art.
Speaker 5: What do they do?
Speaker 4: We don't know what they did. What were they were
Speaker 4: they sign that you know we are here mhm?
Speaker 5: Or maybe even with art on rock art? Is that
Speaker 5: a sign that this is our group?
Speaker 4: So that yeah, So when we talked about complex language,
Speaker 4: what is a complex language and what is it? Is
Speaker 4: it vocabulary? Is it the syntax? Is it that you
Speaker 4: talk about abstract things? Is it that you can talk
Speaker 4: about yourself as a group versus the other group? And
Speaker 4: how do you signify that if you don't, you know,
Speaker 4: you come across the other people, you don't speak the
Speaker 4: same language, how do you tell them who you are?
Speaker 5: How do you tell them?
Speaker 4: Oh, we haven't met, but I am friends with those
Speaker 4: other guys, and they gave me some of the shells
Speaker 4: in this necklace. So maybe that's how you show it.
Speaker 4: Or I am strong and I have you know, I
Speaker 4: rule this land and you can see from the I
Speaker 4: don't know the teeth of the animal that I've hung
Speaker 4: on my neck, that we can handle those things and
Speaker 4: we run this territory. You know, I'm speculating here, but
Speaker 4: this is ways that we try to read from artifacts
Speaker 4: and from material culture. What were they using this for
Speaker 4: and what are they trying to signify this way? If
Speaker 4: that's a difference between the animals and modern humans, it's
Speaker 4: not they Oh, I see you will we hunt together?
Speaker 4: That we are a group of twenty people in want
Speaker 4: to coordinate. Who is gonna you know, how we drive
Speaker 4: these animals to this narrow ravine, maybe to be able
Speaker 4: to hunt them better that I think we know from
Speaker 4: material culture that they could do. We know from the
Speaker 4: hunting they did. We know the number of animals that
Speaker 4: they killed. They were pretty good at that. They were
Speaker 4: pretty good at exploiting the resources together, sharing the food
Speaker 4: and so on. But the more you can call it sophisticated, complex,
Speaker 4: abstract of relating with people you don't see maybe every day.
Speaker 4: That's where modern humans probably had an advantage.
Speaker 1: Is there evidence that they ate each other? Yes, humans
Speaker 1: know that humans and Neanderthals were eating each other.
Speaker 6: With each other.
Speaker 3: There probably there's lots of evidence that that Homo sapiens
Speaker 3: were eating Homo sapiens and that Neanderthals reading Neanderthals.
Speaker 6: But I don't know if.
Speaker 2: There's evidence that Homo sapians are eating Homo sapiens.
Speaker 3: It's it's incredibly well documented in almost every period of
Speaker 3: our past that cannibalism happened.
Speaker 1: But there's not physical evidence of a Neanderthal camp site
Speaker 1: and among their artifacts are butchered Homo sapien remains.
Speaker 3: Huh, Because so there there are a lot, I mean,
Speaker 3: I think like half a dozen famous Neanderthal cannibalism sites,
Speaker 3: and mostly those are too old for there to be
Speaker 3: modern humans being a part of it.
Speaker 6: There was actually there was.
Speaker 3: A sight in Belgium that just came out a couple
Speaker 3: of weeks ago. That actually does fall into the timeframe
Speaker 3: that that modern humans would have been around. And it
Speaker 3: was like this little family that was butchered and eaten and.
Speaker 2: Butchered eating by who.
Speaker 6: Well you know, they didn't leave their calling card, so
Speaker 6: we don't.
Speaker 1: So we don't someone butchered a family of modern humans.
Speaker 1: Someone butchered native family of Neanderthals, and the timing could
Speaker 1: be that it was modern humans, but we don't know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it could be, yes, but there is no indication
Speaker 4: that there were any modern humans nearby.
Speaker 2: But so it could have been by other Neanderthals.
Speaker 5: Yes, So.
Speaker 4: For modern humans, we have evidence of cannibalism, uh as
Speaker 4: he said, in old time periods, and it could It
Speaker 4: can be for because of servation, It can be for
Speaker 4: ritualistic reasons.
Speaker 5: You kind of.
Speaker 4: You can honor the dead, honor the dead basically, yeah,
Speaker 4: or you keep a part of the dead. Or it
Speaker 4: could be even for this, you know, in a part
Speaker 4: of a war and displaying how ferocious and fearsome youre
Speaker 4: and so on. It's the whole range, but most of it,
Speaker 4: I would I think, am I right? It's not in
Speaker 4: a violent context in modern humans.
Speaker 5: For Neanderthals.
Speaker 4: We have sights with evidence of cannibalism from forty thousand
Speaker 4: years for and twenty thousand years even pre Neanderitals early
Speaker 4: how minutes in Europe before Neanderthals.
Speaker 3: The very oldest skull yeah, from in Europe at Aquerka
Speaker 3: Homo antecessor almost a million years old, and that was
Speaker 3: that was really Yeah, so the oldest homo of any
Speaker 3: kind in Europe was was eaten by other humans because.
Speaker 2: It has butcher marks on.
Speaker 6: It has marks, and.
Speaker 4: It has a bunch of marks. And also in the
Speaker 4: inside and France inside in Croatia that you can see
Speaker 4: that the bones are snapped and cut up exactly the
Speaker 4: same way that they snub and cut up the animal bones.
Speaker 1: Oh really, but that's like an eating for food. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you look at like the history of go, look
Speaker 1: at the history of Great Lakes tribes, tribes along the
Speaker 1: Saint Lawrence, the Iroquois in New York, right, they would
Speaker 1: practice a widespread cannibalism related to warfare, meaning you'd catch
Speaker 1: prisoners and there was a sort of ritualistic cannibalism, very widespread,
Speaker 1: very well documented again and again and again, but it
Speaker 1: was usually tied to It wasn't tied to like, boy,
Speaker 1: I'm hungry. It was tied to like a type of domination, right,
Speaker 1: perhaps some sort of religious element to it. But it
Speaker 1: wasn't like I'm going out to get something to eat.
Speaker 1: I'll go hunt down a human to eat. But with
Speaker 1: this case, that might be what was going on. It
Speaker 1: might be like you viewed them as a food source.
Speaker 3: Warfare is really is a really recent thing in terms
Speaker 3: of in terms of human behavior, like like organized warfare
Speaker 3: against other groups where you you you kill off a
Speaker 3: lot of people and you take control. That's like one
Speaker 3: of the most recent Homo sapien behaviors to develop. That's recently,
Speaker 3: so like twenty thirty thousand years what really?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you don't think there were wars between Neanderthals
Speaker 1: and modern humans.
Speaker 3: It's not that there were, well, there were fights, let's say,
Speaker 3: because there's always fights in battles, but in terms of
Speaker 3: let's go and kill everybody, or let's take the women
Speaker 3: and kill everyone else, that's that's a much more recent development.
Speaker 1: Like we make a big old plan and it's got
Speaker 1: step one, step two, step three.
Speaker 3: But a lot of a lot of cannibalism is linked
Speaker 3: somehow to protein shortages. I mean, the biggest state example
Speaker 3: is the Aztec Empire, which you know was a very
Speaker 3: was you know, probably one of the at its heyday,
Speaker 3: was probably one of the biggest in the world before
Speaker 3: the conquest, and they they had kind of state organized
Speaker 3: cannibalism of prisoners of war. But they also, you know,
Speaker 3: they didn't have a lot of other good ways to
Speaker 3: feed protein to the whole population.
Speaker 1: So you think it was it was that cannibalism in
Speaker 1: the Aztec was driven by like literally a need for food.
Speaker 3: This is now I was I was a graduate student
Speaker 3: in anthropology, and this is a very unpopular view in
Speaker 3: anthropology departments.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, I know it happened. What I was
Speaker 1: telling you about the Great Lakes tribes that iqui it's ridiculous,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it's somehow controversial to talk about things
Speaker 1: that are like incredibly well documented.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, well there's always a reluctance because cannibalism is
Speaker 3: a is a slur against a group. Oh they practice cannibalism,
Speaker 3: that means they weren't quite a civilized as us.
Speaker 2: I want to I want to clarify I don't hold
Speaker 2: that opinion I mean.
Speaker 1: I don't practice. I don't.
Speaker 6: I don't know practice.
Speaker 1: But like we're talking about people live hundreds of years ago,
Speaker 1: I don't hold it as a I don't count it
Speaker 1: against them.
Speaker 3: Well, we can go to the store and buy as
Speaker 3: much meat as we want, but if you know, if
Speaker 3: there's a certain kind of hunger, like if you can
Speaker 3: you can eat as much nuts and fruit and vegetables
Speaker 3: as you want, but if you haven't had enough protein,
Speaker 3: there's a certain kind of hunger that's almost unbearable. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and yeah, I don't it's it's it's always been a
Speaker 3: part of our ancestors behavior. And and it could be
Speaker 3: you know, some respected elder died and you honor him
Speaker 3: by consuming everything and then everyone gets fed, or it
Speaker 3: could be.
Speaker 6: You know, as part of a as part of a
Speaker 6: battle against some group.
Speaker 3: I mean, so like this the site in Belgium I
Speaker 3: mentioned is like a Neanderthal family.
Speaker 1: We don't know that there were the dynamics of the family.
Speaker 6: I think it was the.
Speaker 3: It was I think it was the men were closely
Speaker 3: related and the women had come in from somewhere else.
Speaker 6: But even that, we don't group.
Speaker 3: There's like six or so individuals, but We don't know
Speaker 3: that they were all like slaughtered and butchered at the
Speaker 3: same time. It could be because things get preserved in
Speaker 3: caves that it could be the you know, and as
Speaker 3: you know, frankly, that's a lot of meat. You know
Speaker 3: that six people is gonna feed hundreds, So you wouldn't
Speaker 3: you wouldn't kill six people in Neanderthal times purely for food.
Speaker 3: Maybe they maybe it was done one or two at
Speaker 3: a time and they just happened to Washington.
Speaker 1: How heavy was a Neanderthal if you had to.
Speaker 6: Guess, let's say one hundred and fifty pounds.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I would say humans would have a poor
Speaker 1: yield like a deer fort. But I bet you humans
Speaker 1: have a super low yield, a sluper low meat yield.
Speaker 2: I bet.
Speaker 1: So if you have one hundred let's say you have
Speaker 1: a one hundred and fifty pound Neanderthal, Let's say you
Speaker 1: get fifty pounds. Yeah, it's a lot. Fifty pounds of
Speaker 1: flesh off that sucker.
Speaker 3: Well, and the Aztecs could cook him into a soup.
Speaker 3: But Neanderthals didn't exactly have big cauldrons, you know, to
Speaker 3: get it to really extremely.
Speaker 1: But that's really interesting idea to think about it, they'd
Speaker 1: be like, that's a lot of meat.
Speaker 4: The type of studies that it would be very Neanderthals
Speaker 4: wouldn't be, or humans are not.
Speaker 5: Generally very nutritious to eat.
Speaker 4: I don't know, because they're generally lean. I don't know,
Speaker 4: but I think the condoxt of starvation then that probably
Speaker 4: changes the equation. I mean, you asked earlier forty thousand
Speaker 4: modern humans may have been there, may have been nearby,
Speaker 4: and that may have increased the pressures on that population,
Speaker 4: on that small group of Neanderthals. And I mean just
Speaker 4: and as Mike said, we have these individuals in a cave,
Speaker 4: but a cave is not a reflection of what was
Speaker 4: actually happening, and it's just that group. It's whoever happened
Speaker 4: to be brought back to the cave, cut up, eaten up,
Speaker 4: and so on. You know, there probably were more people
Speaker 4: from that group over one hundred years, say who died
Speaker 4: and never didn't die in the cave, never brought to
Speaker 4: the cave, because why would you do that unless you
Speaker 4: have you really want someone in the family to bury
Speaker 4: them properly and bring them in a cave.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe they only brought the butchered people into the cave.
Speaker 1: Take a cave for instance from those time periods. Like
Speaker 1: with a Neanderthal site, do you have a bone bed
Speaker 1: or a debris pile or a midden where it has deer,
Speaker 1: it has cattle bones, it has sheep bones, and just
Speaker 1: interspersed interlaid with it are Neanderthal bones, meaning that they're
Speaker 1: just routinely eating what I bring home today. Today I
Speaker 1: brought home a turtle. Yes, that brought a horse. Last
Speaker 1: week I brought home. Last week I brought home another Neanderthal.
Speaker 1: And it was just all treated the same or does
Speaker 1: it seem different somehow?
Speaker 4: It's hard to tell. Like he just asked me, now,
Speaker 4: I was crapping it like that, And I said, who knows?
Speaker 4: Because crapping out, which is a site in Croatia that has.
Speaker 3: It has like thirty at least, I mean the numbers
Speaker 3: go back and forth, but probably thirty individual Neanderthals, a
Speaker 3: lot of whom were.
Speaker 2: Butchered in a Neanderthal camp well.
Speaker 6: In a cave site in a case.
Speaker 4: But I said, who knows, because it was excavated and
Speaker 4: almost completely excavated. The whole thing was dug out, excavated.
Speaker 6: And in like one hundred and twenty eight.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and probably if we have no idea basically, but
Speaker 4: they kept the human bones, they probably threw away a
Speaker 4: lot of the animal bones. Now we if we excavated it, Now,
Speaker 4: if we go really fine detail and see a lot
Speaker 4: of time to excavate it and actually see did they
Speaker 4: come from the same Yeah.
Speaker 1: There was by what they look at what they were
Speaker 1: looking for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was a bue. It was It wasn't a
Speaker 4: bi It was that the methods were very different, and
Speaker 4: they just didn't couldn't look at this, didn't want it,
Speaker 4: didn't have the same questions that we have, couldn't look
Speaker 4: at this level of detail, and we just you just
Speaker 4: can't go back and reconstructed were in more recent excavations.
Speaker 4: You begin to ask those questions and you do things
Speaker 4: what I said, like what I said, that cut up
Speaker 4: the same way. And but then caves are not it's
Speaker 4: not like you go in and do something this year
Speaker 4: or this spring, and then you go back in the
Speaker 4: fall or next thing and so on, and you can
Speaker 4: see that nicely laid out in layers. Caves are often
Speaker 4: this stuff is often compressed, and what you see in
Speaker 4: a slice like this could be a few hundred years,
Speaker 4: it would be a few thousand years. You can't you
Speaker 4: can't really go into that level of detail.
Speaker 2: Everything is kind of ground in together.
Speaker 4: Yes, uh again not always, but often in some cases
Speaker 4: you have in caves what could be burials of Neanderthals.
Speaker 4: There are even like in Sidron it was it wasn't
Speaker 4: mixed together.
Speaker 5: We just know that they were. They ate those.
Speaker 3: As a cave in Spain, that's another famous site of
Speaker 3: where it seems like a small group of closely related
Speaker 3: Neanderthals were butchered, but also but also butchered animal. But
Speaker 3: I mean, how do you know that it was butchered
Speaker 3: because the butchering looks just like the animal bones.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in a sense, they were not treated us more special.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know you know the you guess were the
Speaker 1: Donner Party, Yes, right, these many years later, these researchers
Speaker 1: went into the trap the midden sites were the Donner
Speaker 1: Party were eating their dogs and some things they killed
Speaker 1: and their livestock, right, and they were wondering where are
Speaker 1: the human bones because we know that members of the
Speaker 1: Donner Party were practicing cannibalism. But they don't find the
Speaker 1: human bones. So then people pointed out, well, they must
Speaker 1: not have done it. The question is perhaps they regarded
Speaker 1: those remains differently, meaning you were forced to commit cannibalism,
Speaker 1: you were forced to eat your relatives. But that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that you flick the bones out with the dog bones, right.
Speaker 1: They might have had a separate way, out of respect
Speaker 1: or whatever, that they would have entombed those remains or
Speaker 1: burned them up in a fire or something that was
Speaker 1: more ceremonial, even though they ate them. Something was more
Speaker 1: ceremonial than throwing them in the garbage pile.
Speaker 3: Well, there's also a huge difference in time skills. So
Speaker 3: you could go to the Donner Party, which was not
Speaker 3: that long ago. You know, you can go to that
Speaker 3: site and see where things are. But a lot of
Speaker 3: these Neanderthal cave sites, the bones all get washed down
Speaker 3: into a gully, so so we don't know where they
Speaker 3: were originally. But the reason they're preserved is that they're
Speaker 3: washed into a like an easy to hard to get
Speaker 3: to place in the cave.
Speaker 1: Okay, I got you. What evidence do we have of
Speaker 1: how they dressed and did they And I remember seeing
Speaker 1: like this idea that they had jewelry, and I can't
Speaker 1: remember the details. But someone throwing out the idea that
Speaker 1: maybe they were getting the idea of wearing jewelry from
Speaker 1: modern humans. Okay, yep, Like what were they wearing and
Speaker 1: were they like beautifying themselves?
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, So some of these things we can answer
Speaker 4: and some we cannot. I'll start with the beautifying okay,
Speaker 4: and the skin. I mean, we do tattoos, we do
Speaker 4: coloring with red ochre or whatever.
Speaker 5: None of this will survive.
Speaker 4: So they could be having elaborate rituals of getting together
Speaker 4: and painting. And you know, my group does this, your
Speaker 4: group does that. We will have no idea about that.
Speaker 2: No, there would be no way to know if they
Speaker 2: were tattooing themselves.
Speaker 4: No, all we would have. All we do have sometimes
Speaker 4: is the pigments. And we know that sometimes they used pigments,
Speaker 4: not as much as we don't find another speaker us
Speaker 4: for modern humans later, but we do know that they
Speaker 4: were aware of them. You know, there could be whole
Speaker 4: areas of stuff that they were doing that we just
Speaker 4: cannot having a handle on whether they use clothing. They did,
Speaker 4: because they wouldn't have survived in ice age Europe without clothing.
Speaker 4: Now saying ice h Europe. It wasn't always uniformly cold.
Speaker 4: Some periods were fairly warm, even as warm as today.
Speaker 4: But generally to survive, especially overnight, it would require some
Speaker 4: kind of clothing.
Speaker 1: Would it require tailored clothing or do you think they
Speaker 1: could have just draped themselves with skins?
Speaker 4: Tailor clothing definitely have been better. We don't have any
Speaker 4: evidence of needles from Neanderitals. We do have we have
Speaker 4: them from modern humans very early on, but not from Neanderthals.
Speaker 4: But we do know that they could make string and
Speaker 4: maybe they could fashion something this way, so they the
Speaker 4: general thing is that they must have used, you know,
Speaker 4: they had some kind of clothing. How came back to
Speaker 4: the elaborate They were elaborate that can we can use
Speaker 4: for anything. How elaborated it was, whether it was you know,
Speaker 4: fashion enough to provide better protection from cold, we don't
Speaker 4: quite know. Jewelry we have some evidence of using jewelry
Speaker 4: in going back to that crappin a side.
Speaker 5: They had talent, yes, the eagle talents that.
Speaker 4: Now now there is such a thing that they were
Speaker 4: fit together in a sort of necklace because they also
Speaker 4: have kind of wear on the sides from rubbing against
Speaker 4: each other.
Speaker 2: Talents.
Speaker 4: Again, it's not all that common, but we know that
Speaker 4: they did and they did perforate shells. The thing that
Speaker 4: you mentioned about did they learn from modern human mm hm.
Speaker 4: There is this time frame in southwest France we have
Speaker 4: neanatals and modern humans at the same time, towards the
Speaker 4: end of the presence of the neanditals and the beginning
Speaker 4: of the of monern humans.
Speaker 5: In Europe.
Speaker 4: We have some sites where they overlap, but overlap in
Speaker 4: a prehistory in a palalythic sense, which means that one
Speaker 4: could be here, you know, adults could be here now
Speaker 4: and for you know, a few years in one side
Speaker 4: and then leave and then one hundred years later or
Speaker 4: fifty years later monern humans gap no actual direct interaction
Speaker 4: with them. And we're talking earlier about genetics and interbreeding
Speaker 4: and so on and how things have changed. But when
Speaker 4: we were graduate students, the idea was that modern humans
Speaker 4: and nanatals were in that part of France at the
Speaker 4: same same time. They but they did not mix with
Speaker 4: each other because we did not the whole genetics things
Speaker 4: hadn't come in here.
Speaker 2: Like, we didn't know that they were hooking up.
Speaker 5: Absolutely not.
Speaker 4: They had a barrier. They did not want to do that.
Speaker 4: They were not doing that. Ever.
Speaker 5: Was somebody actually have somebody who wrote a book.
Speaker 4: It is kind of he writes more popular or more
Speaker 4: archeology for a bigger audience, and he wrote a little book,
Speaker 4: I think, or I can't remember. He said no sex
Speaker 4: we are or ignations Orgnations is the culture name of
Speaker 4: the earliest modern humans in southwest France. We call the
Speaker 4: stone tools and stuff that they produced.
Speaker 2: Or saying there was it was a joke.
Speaker 4: It was a joke on other people saying no, they
Speaker 4: had no contact. I mean, strictly speaking, it was true.
Speaker 4: We had no evidence to show that they had contact,
Speaker 4: but we kind of everyone most people were saying they
Speaker 4: did not anyway, So the idea was there that so
Speaker 4: the ourignation site was modern human. We thought it was
Speaker 4: modern human. And the Chateau Peronian, which is the other culture,
Speaker 4: the other layers that we found that we thought they
Speaker 4: were Neanderthal.
Speaker 5: And there are.
Speaker 4: Tools in the Chattel Peronian and shells that looked that
Speaker 4: look like it looks similar to what modern humans were doing.
Speaker 4: And the idea was doing that was that the Neanderthals,
Speaker 4: oh maybe the Neanditals saw them and thought, oh this works,
Speaker 4: this works, well, this looks like it could be a
Speaker 4: good thing to make, and they kind of recreated the
Speaker 4: shape but with a different method of napping the stone.
Speaker 4: And the idea was also the shells. Maybe they just
Speaker 4: saw them from modern humans and then they found their
Speaker 4: own and started using that.
Speaker 1: Now, this that's really interesting that it was that they
Speaker 1: knew the end the end, but weren't but developed the
Speaker 1: different process to achieve that thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, so you see something to say, oh I
Speaker 4: can make that, but you don't actually make.
Speaker 5: It the same way as the person who made it.
Speaker 3: So this was so this was stone tools, but it
Speaker 3: was also a jewelry. So it's like primitive Neanderthal jewelry,
Speaker 3: or that's what they thought it was.
Speaker 5: Yes, so, but.
Speaker 4: Now the thing is more that the nanodals developed these things,
Speaker 4: could have developed these things on their own. But also
Speaker 4: we have evidence of modern humans in Europe earlier than
Speaker 4: just the forty thousand years small, very small, very localized.
Speaker 4: So personally, I would not be surprised if five years
Speaker 4: from now there is clear evidence that Neanderdals ditch shells
Speaker 4: and jewelry or and art on their own developed it
Speaker 4: on their own, and I would also not be surprised
Speaker 4: is actually we have more modern humans and maybe there
Speaker 4: was more interaction in exchange and learning from each other
Speaker 4: than we thought.
Speaker 1: Man, we're never going to know enough to know enough.
Speaker 1: You're never going to answer all it, like, you know,
Speaker 1: we're never going to know was there ever? Whatever you know,
Speaker 1: was there? Like they ran in and in a modern
Speaker 1: human and Neanderthal had like a relationship and split off
Speaker 1: and oh, I'm sure a family, you know, and like
Speaker 1: in some cave or whatever, like what just never It's
Speaker 1: just it's frustrating. It's frustrating the things we'll never know
Speaker 1: about how they interacted.
Speaker 3: We again, we've been talking to all these geneticists and
Speaker 3: one of them said, I think we just have to
Speaker 3: accept that things were messy and that we're not really
Speaker 3: going to know the full story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a there's a quote we use a fair
Speaker 1: bit on the show, and it was introduced by a guest,
Speaker 1: and it was the past is a strange country, right,
Speaker 1: and and here you get to it was a I
Speaker 1: don't know it real strange. The past was a real strange. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the past, that's right. The past is the foreign country.
Speaker 1: So because it's just there's no you can get a
Speaker 1: little bit like you can look at all the times
Speaker 1: when and and like when Europeans kind of in the
Speaker 1: thirteen hundreds, fourteen hundreds, fifteen hundreds, when when Europeans kind
Speaker 1: of broke out of the continent and we had transoceanic ships, right,
Speaker 1: and they started running into all these long lost relatives,
Speaker 1: right they reached South America, whatever, they reached the hier Arctic,
Speaker 1: and you have these interactions and the perception of the
Speaker 1: perception like people that did pair off, right, like like
Speaker 1: French that would come over and they would build a
Speaker 1: family with a Native American woman, How that was perceived, right,
Speaker 1: the cultural clash of it, the way their peers looked
Speaker 1: at it. Just that we'll never know what the perception was.
Speaker 1: How how is it perceived socially that that humans and
Speaker 1: theanerthals are pairing up, you know what I mean? Like,
Speaker 1: we'll just never understand it.
Speaker 3: Or would they have would they have noticed it at all?
Speaker 3: Or would it would have just felt like another case
Speaker 3: of oh, there's some guys over there.
Speaker 2: Oh and yeah, yeah, that's true too. Maybe there wasn't
Speaker 2: this huge comprehension.
Speaker 1: That they were a different people with a different history.
Speaker 2: It was just they were a thing.
Speaker 1: They were Yeah, maybe just thinking that was mostly like me.
Speaker 6: Maybe it just happened.
Speaker 1: Well, I have considered that. I always like to think
Speaker 1: of it in terms of a really dramatic encounter.
Speaker 6: It's in us in them thing.
Speaker 3: But to me, the perspective is that it was all us, Like,
Speaker 3: it wasn't us Homo sapiens and them Neanderthals. It was
Speaker 3: part of a big breeding population and it wasn't just
Speaker 3: those two.
Speaker 6: There was Denisovans.
Speaker 3: There's there's evidence of some very archaic perhaps Homo erectus
Speaker 3: ancestor with introgression into Denisovans.
Speaker 6: There's talk of.
Speaker 3: Ghost ancestor is a term that geneticis used when they
Speaker 3: know that it's old but they don't know what it is.
Speaker 3: And there's there's there are cases in West Africa of
Speaker 3: really recent, like twenty thousand years introgression from something archaic that.
Speaker 2: We haven't identified.
Speaker 3: We don't know what it is, and there's even one
Speaker 3: model that says, you know, two percent of our DNAs
Speaker 3: Neanderthal up to twenty percent could be a ghost ancestor,
Speaker 3: and by that it could be just there's a lot
Speaker 3: of mixing in. I mean this, I keep hitting this
Speaker 3: mixing in is just something that is part of our past.
Speaker 1: And I know that you explained that you had these people.
Speaker 1: The Nanderthals are spread over this huge areas, so you
Speaker 1: can't speak like what the the calendar looked like for
Speaker 1: Nanderthals in Siberia was different than what the annual calendar
Speaker 1: was for Neanderthals on the Mediterranean, Right, But what what
Speaker 1: was their diet? And do you see that their diet
Speaker 1: was different than modern humans? The was the component of
Speaker 1: their diet significantly different than what modern humans utilized when
Speaker 1: they arrived on the same.
Speaker 3: Landscape Neanderthal's, like you said, they they kept surprising us
Speaker 3: the last ten twenty years. Oh they did this, they
Speaker 3: did this, It was all very modern. The one thing
Speaker 3: that they the one threshold that they haven't fully crossed
Speaker 3: is fishing. That Homo sapiens had really sophisticated harpoon spears
Speaker 3: to fish for catfish far earlier than anyone expected than
Speaker 3: anyone realized. And wells Neanderthals did seasonal shell you know,
Speaker 3: seafood collecting molluscs, and maybe did some fishing. The level
Speaker 3: was completely different and I think that was a that
Speaker 3: was a major change in diet hooks.
Speaker 6: No, no, oh, I see.
Speaker 3: We went to see the earliest harpoon points, which are
Speaker 3: at the Smithsonian, and it's it's just mind blowing. These
Speaker 3: things are ninety thousand years old, and that they were
Speaker 3: that modern humans in Africa were spearing catfish.
Speaker 6: That that was really yeah.
Speaker 3: And if you think about it, like a catfish, a
Speaker 3: seventy pound catfish is going to feed a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Do you see in Neanderthal campsites or in caves, is
Speaker 1: there a lot of evidence that they were processing nuts
Speaker 1: and seeds or do they seem to be primarily carnivorous.
Speaker 4: When you excavate very carefully and with techniques that are
Speaker 4: available now, we're not available even ten or twenty years back,
Speaker 4: you find the little seeds, you find the plant remains.
Speaker 4: You can go into the plaque of teeth. Oh really,
Speaker 4: and you know they you know, luckily for us, they
Speaker 4: didn't have hygienists, so a lot of it is still
Speaker 4: left on their teeth, so you can remove that and
Speaker 4: you can find what they You can find even remains of.
Speaker 2: Seeds or cake do under their teeth.
Speaker 4: Yes, Kate on their teeth or you can see the
Speaker 4: scratches on their teeth.
Speaker 3: My favorite one was is evidence that they were eating
Speaker 3: camam mile. Yes like we so they might have been
Speaker 3: big game hunters, but they you know, they enjoyed their
Speaker 3: of herbal tea.
Speaker 4: Maybe it was for medicine. Is it a medicine. Maybe
Speaker 4: it was for flavoring. And it's actually a few years
Speaker 4: back in a cave in Iraq, shinny dark, they found
Speaker 4: a sort of flat bread type of thing, flat bread,
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 5: It was.
Speaker 4: It was basically lentils or a form of lentils in water,
Speaker 4: probably soaked in water, and that kind of mushed, pulverized
Speaker 4: and then mixed with nuts and then yeah, they did
Speaker 4: and they baked it and uh basically because the people
Speaker 4: who published it did studied this in this site and
Speaker 4: another site in Greece that also has a long sequence
Speaker 4: that same similar recipe. More or less, they modern humans
Speaker 4: made it also at the same site really again and
Speaker 4: again later. You know, if you look at the because
Speaker 4: these some caves, sequences that can go for tens of
Speaker 4: thousands of years, not uninterrupted, but you can find slices
Speaker 4: and time and you know, even so that the Neanderthal
Speaker 4: thing was seventy seventy thousand years old. Roughly there was
Speaker 4: a modern human stuff from thirty thousand years and for
Speaker 4: younger also that they made a similar because they had
Speaker 4: access to the same plants basically, so a similar kind
Speaker 4: of thing, processing lentils and and adding nuts, unding even grasses.
Speaker 4: I don't even you know, I'm not very good with plants.
Speaker 4: I'm not one of these people who recognize plants where
Speaker 4: they see them. But they had like wild olives, which
Speaker 4: is my favorite.
Speaker 1: Wild grapes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, shark plates and stuff.
Speaker 4: I guess you know that little flood bread You could
Speaker 4: add a grilled means on top when it's chased.
Speaker 1: Great, that'll be the next article that Neanderthals invented.
Speaker 5: Pizza, No, my gyro, you know that pizza.
Speaker 4: But and in terms of will we ever find this,
Speaker 4: will we ever find that? We also ten or twenty
Speaker 4: years ago and never thought that we would find genetic
Speaker 4: material be able to say this person was related to
Speaker 4: this person. You know, this were mother and daughter. We
Speaker 4: never thought we would find a hybrid and be able
Speaker 4: to say that this girl was actually had a Neanderdal
Speaker 4: father and the Nissovan mother. We never thought we would
Speaker 4: find this stuff. We also never thought we would be
Speaker 4: able to find the degree of plant remains that we
Speaker 4: find now, or fish for example. Yes, fewer fish bones
Speaker 4: from Neanderthals sites, but to find the fishbone in an
Speaker 4: archaeological site, it takes a lot of work, and it
Speaker 4: takes a lot of re sieving very very carefully, which
Speaker 4: most people didn't do. You know, people didn't do this
Speaker 4: stuff routinely even twenty or thirty years ago. And if
Speaker 4: you go to these old sites in Europe, we know
Speaker 4: a lot about nanatals in Europe, and that's great and
Speaker 4: we're all interested in that because we know a lot.
Speaker 4: But also a lot of these old sites that our
Speaker 4: knowledge comes from are destroyed. They were completely excavated when
Speaker 4: they were excavated. Now we go very carefully, very slowly,
Speaker 4: we leave part of the site so that people who
Speaker 4: are called us to count twenty or thirty years later
Speaker 4: and say, oh, we can look at this question now.
Speaker 4: You know, you have questions like how did they interact,
Speaker 4: what did they want to do? We can look at
Speaker 4: this question now, at this side that we know has
Speaker 4: this potentially relevant evidence, and look at it in much
Speaker 4: more detail.
Speaker 5: With what we know now.
Speaker 4: Now, we intentionally leave a lot of the site untouched
Speaker 4: so people can come in the future and do it,
Speaker 4: and we can't go back to crapping and see what
Speaker 4: they had because there's nothing left to actually go and
Speaker 4: excavate in the site.
Speaker 1: Again, I'm imagining the end of Neanderthals historically, I pictured
Speaker 1: it not historically like it in my mind's eye.
Speaker 2: I pictured the.
Speaker 1: End as being that there's you know, one little family
Speaker 1: left in a cave somewhere hiding, you know, and the
Speaker 1: modern humans are you know, eventually stumble across them and
Speaker 1: kill them off, and they're like, ha, we did it.
Speaker 1: You know, we rid We've read europe of the Scourge
Speaker 1: of the Neanderthal. You know, now it's our time to
Speaker 1: take possession of the continent and shine. You know, there's
Speaker 1: there's that narrative, right, but there's this other narrative that
Speaker 1: that it didn't go that way. And you said it
Speaker 1: was this meta population of people, and there was far
Speaker 1: more modern humans on the landscape than there were Neanderthals
Speaker 1: on the landscape, and in certain circumstances they enter bred
Speaker 1: and then maybe without anyone noticing, one day, gradually, one
Speaker 1: day they're just there, weren't any or because they'd been
Speaker 1: absorbed into the population, you know, do you imagine it
Speaker 1: more like more like them dying out right, like so
Speaker 1: that the passenger pigeon, Like we know who the last
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon was.
Speaker 2: It was named Martha.
Speaker 1: It died in whatever, nineteen oh three in the Cincinnati
Speaker 1: Zoo or whatever the hell it was. Like do you
Speaker 1: imagine it like that or do you imagine it like
Speaker 1: a fading that wasn't realized by anyone. I think that
Speaker 1: the Neanderthals didn't even know that they were vanishing.
Speaker 6: I think it's a fading.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's there's this they call it the Lepido child,
Speaker 3: this young boy skeleton in Portugal. It's like twenty four
Speaker 3: to twenty five thousand years old. A Grivetian. We were
Speaker 3: talking about the Gravettians for these amazing people who came
Speaker 3: into Europe and much more advanced, and debate went on
Speaker 3: for years. There seemed to be some Neanderthal traits in him.
Speaker 3: He like some of his bones kind of looked a
Speaker 3: bit in Neanderthal And so like the old school, who
Speaker 3: thought at the time they were the new school was saying, no,
Speaker 3: that's impossible. There were no hybrids. Modern humans, you know,
Speaker 3: had completely replaced the Neanderthals by then, So we're talking about,
Speaker 3: you know, if the last identifiable Neanderthal bones are forty
Speaker 3: thousand years old, so we're talking about fifteen thousand years later.
Speaker 3: There's this skeleton that kind of looks like a hybrid.
Speaker 3: So I think it's more like that fading out that,
Speaker 3: you know, the the kind of like at some point
Speaker 3: there were no no more pure bread Neanderthals. But in
Speaker 3: a way, there's no such thing as a pure bread
Speaker 3: anything and human evolution because there was.
Speaker 6: There were mixing events happening all the time.
Speaker 3: But to me, it would have faded out that way
Speaker 3: of of the mixed populations looking less and less Neanderthal
Speaker 3: until you could no longer see it. You can't see
Speaker 3: it in us, you can just get it from our DNA.
Speaker 1: Yeah, rather than you know, because if you're going to
Speaker 1: make a movie about it, man, you'd make a movie
Speaker 1: where they knew they were at the end.
Speaker 2: Well, do you know they knew they were the last
Speaker 2: ones left?
Speaker 1: You know, But that's putting like a level of drama
Speaker 1: on it that maybe wasn't there.
Speaker 4: I don't yeah. I think over the area of where
Speaker 4: the nanditals were, probably different scenarios played out. In some cases,
Speaker 4: you could have hads who disappeared from their lives or
Speaker 4: left the lane and never came back, even maybe even
Speaker 4: before more than humans show it up.
Speaker 1: I got last question for you. What would you each
Speaker 1: ask this to each of you? What is the thing
Speaker 1: you wish you knew the most about Neanderthals, Like like
Speaker 1: if you could have a question answered, what would it be.
Speaker 4: You know the most now or new?
Speaker 5: Like like sometimes in the past.
Speaker 1: Like what is it?
Speaker 2: What is the burning question?
Speaker 1: And even if it's something that you know, you'll never answer,
Speaker 1: like like what is a sort of easily understood question
Speaker 1: that you have?
Speaker 6: M I mean I would.
Speaker 3: I want to get back to your question of was
Speaker 3: their language as complex as ours? I would I would
Speaker 3: want to know if they understood nuance, if they if
Speaker 3: they could laugh at a subtle joke mhm. To me,
Speaker 3: that's that's a big part of humanity. And they had
Speaker 3: so much, but they didn't have everything that Homo sapiens had,
Speaker 3: And that to me is like would they laugh if
Speaker 3: I said some stupid would they get dad jokes?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Would they ever roll their eyes at someone like,
Speaker 2: oh that guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think they would roll their eyes
Speaker 3: at someone, but like subtle jokes. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
Speaker 3: That's a good question.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess I put it also in the how
Speaker 4: their minds worked. I would in the same area how
Speaker 4: their minds worked, but maybe how how they planned forward,
Speaker 4: how much how much they were able to say, I'm
Speaker 4: going to pick up the stone and do this and
Speaker 4: then do that, and kind of how much they how
Speaker 4: much more were planning they had.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if they thought like I would like to make
Speaker 1: acts in the future, but first I'll need to go
Speaker 1: do this and this and this in order to get
Speaker 1: ready for that down the road.
Speaker 4: Yeah, or if I sit all this, if if me
Speaker 4: and my mate sit on the you know, outside this
Speaker 4: cave and we watch the animals over there migrate, would
Speaker 4: they be able how much would they be able to see? Okay,
Speaker 4: so if I stay here in the spring and they
Speaker 4: migrate south, and if I bring they do this and
Speaker 4: then do that, and if we kind of move them
Speaker 4: direct them this way, me and my friends can trap
Speaker 4: them over there. Because how much knowledge they had of
Speaker 4: the world around them and how much they could plan
Speaker 4: ahead and coordinate with others and.
Speaker 5: What to do.
Speaker 1: My question is not really a question, but like I
Speaker 1: you know, I married a modern human just because there's
Speaker 1: no options. But I do wonder had I encountered that
Speaker 1: Neanderthal woman with the eagle claw necklace?
Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean, what I've been into her?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what I've been strict at, what I've fallen in love,
Speaker 1: you know, with that necklace.
Speaker 2: You know, that's a question.
Speaker 1: And the other one is, like I was brought up earlier,
Speaker 1: is just again it just it burns in my head,
Speaker 1: is like what was the comprehension level of could they
Speaker 1: comprehended themselves as a thing? And if they could, could
Speaker 1: they comprehend of it as being a thing that was
Speaker 1: coming to an end? And you're like, just probably not, Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably not because without written record, you know, they wouldn't
Speaker 1: have a notion of what the total what their total
Speaker 1: population size was at some point and that they're now
Speaker 1: less and that they're losing ground, or you know, like
Speaker 1: any sort of notion of history.
Speaker 3: I think it's only really recently that we modern humans
Speaker 3: think of ourselves as one thing. I mean, when when
Speaker 3: just the term homo sapien was developed. There were five subcategories.
Speaker 3: And you mentioned when in about the discovery, you know,
Speaker 3: when Europeans discovered the Americas and there are people there,
Speaker 3: there was a debate are these from the same creation? Sure,
Speaker 3: so the the notion that we are we Homo sapiens
Speaker 3: on Earth today are one's it's a new idea. And
Speaker 3: so if Neanderthals are thinking, you know, they're you know,
Speaker 3: we're talking about group size. You know, they probably had
Speaker 3: there one hundred and thirty and that was that's probably
Speaker 3: that was their world.
Speaker 6: Those are my people. They didn't think beyond that.
Speaker 3: And then if they encountered other Neanderthals, they probably thought
Speaker 3: that's something different.
Speaker 2: But you imagine, like take like.
Speaker 1: Bison. Okay, we we we have very few of them,
Speaker 1: very few of them left relative to how many there were.
Speaker 1: Right those individual animals, as far as we know, those
Speaker 1: individual animals carry with them no recognition of what they
Speaker 1: once were or what happened to them, or no idea
Speaker 1: that there's something less than that their empire collapsed, do
Speaker 1: you know, I mean they're like, we know it, but
Speaker 1: as far as we know the way we can comprehend it,
Speaker 1: they have no idea.
Speaker 2: Of what their history is.
Speaker 1: They're just right, They're aware of the ones around them,
Speaker 1: but they would have no way, they would never have
Speaker 1: a way of conveying.
Speaker 2: Like we used to dominate this landscape, you know.
Speaker 5: But even.
Speaker 4: That idea that we have is pretty recent. If you
Speaker 4: were even a farmer in medieval Europe, did you even
Speaker 4: know what Europe is? Yeah, that's true, I mean you had,
Speaker 4: but still people had, you know, stories, they had religion,
Speaker 4: they had traditions, they had stuff that was passed down
Speaker 4: from generation to generations, so they had some notion of
Speaker 4: where they came from, what their group was. Without having this,
Speaker 4: you know, they had never seen a.
Speaker 5: Map of Europe.
Speaker 4: Equally, Homo sapiens in thirty thousand year old Europe had
Speaker 4: never seen a map of human had no idea how
Speaker 4: my ancestors came from Africa and we you know, we
Speaker 4: have taken over the world and now we're going to
Speaker 4: take over Europe. Also, there was there wasn't such a
Speaker 4: thing or you could, but they probably and even the
Speaker 4: Neandols probably did have the notion of their group was
Speaker 4: coming to an end there and maybe their parents and grandparents,
Speaker 4: you know, as far back they would go. I mean,
Speaker 4: we don't know, but probably when they sat and the
Speaker 4: campfire or whatever equivalent they had, they did tell some stories.
Speaker 4: They did transfer to their kids the way of doing things.
Speaker 4: You know, you work the stone this way, you cut
Speaker 4: the cut of the animal this way, and you prepare
Speaker 4: cook the food this way. All this was stuff presumably
Speaker 4: was passed down from generation to generation, and along that
Speaker 4: some idea of you know, where they that they had ancestors,
Speaker 4: that they were a group, but how farther geographically or
Speaker 4: chronologically a notion they had It was certainly nothing similar
Speaker 4: to us now. But also most of our ancestors did
Speaker 4: not have that perception of a war world that went
Speaker 4: so far beyond them. Most of our awer often quite
Speaker 4: a lot of our ancestors did not move very far
Speaker 4: from where they were born.
Speaker 2: Do you guys think you'll.
Speaker 1: Do? You do you envision a fourth edition of your
Speaker 1: book as new stuff comes out?
Speaker 4: I was actually thinking when you started that the the
Speaker 4: you know, the different editions to update it. Our book
Speaker 4: started because the previous book from the same publisher was
Speaker 4: completely out of date. And I was at that point
Speaker 4: teaching and teaching continue education class for adults, and I said,
Speaker 4: at some point in Mike, I don't know what to
Speaker 4: tell these people to read, because they can't just go
Speaker 4: to the library and read all the articles with all
Speaker 4: the new stuff. And there is no easy way, you know,
Speaker 4: no book to give to them. And he goes, well,
Speaker 4: why don't we write that?
Speaker 5: And the person who wrote.
Speaker 4: The previous book or one of the tools of previous
Speaker 4: was my postoc mentor. And I think at some point
Speaker 4: I said to him, would you want to do that?
Speaker 4: He goes, oh, my god, no, that would be writing
Speaker 4: the book from the from scratch. There's no there's no
Speaker 4: rewriting that book because it's too far out of date.
Speaker 4: I suspect that.
Speaker 6: I think we're there. I think I.
Speaker 4: Suspect that if we read do it, it will take
Speaker 4: a lot of work.
Speaker 1: It needs to be at some point, it needs to
Speaker 1: be like a demolish and rebuild.
Speaker 3: Well, the category is like, if you were reading a
Speaker 3: Neanderthal book, you would want all the questions you asked,
Speaker 3: where's the section on ornament and clothing, where's the section
Speaker 3: on Neanderthal diet? Ten years ago, there wasn't enough to
Speaker 3: fill a section of either of those things. Where's a
Speaker 3: section on Neanderthal cave art? That didn't even exist, so
Speaker 3: now there are all these news and so we would
Speaker 3: just we would organize it differently.
Speaker 6: If we had to do it today.
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, if you want to find out what.
Speaker 1: If you want to find out what's known now, okay,
Speaker 1: the current landscape, check out the Neanderthals Rediscovered how modern
Speaker 1: science is rewriting their story.
Speaker 2: Make sure you get the third edition, right, yeah, don't get.
Speaker 1: The first to get the third edition authors Dimitra, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do the phonetic Papa Gianni, Papa Gianni, just so
Speaker 1: you know when you're reading it it's pronounced. I was
Speaker 1: laughing earlier because yahness, my beloved colleague, his father, we
Speaker 1: call Papayani.
Speaker 2: And say your last name Papa Yanni.
Speaker 1: So Dimitri Papa Gianni or Papayanni and Mike morrise. And
Speaker 1: then if you want, you know, as things change and update,
Speaker 1: look to these look to these authors to keep you up.
Speaker 1: Be thank you for joining.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much, this has been fun.
Speaker 1: Appreciate