So some primitive things. Neanderthals , they also used hot food, so their brains also were bigger than animals.And some say that even bigger than Homo sapiens' brains.
She is known in Ethiopia by her own name. Neanderthals disappearing about 40,000 years ago, about 5,000 years after we entered Europe.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. Neanderthals appeared 350,000 years ago, disappeared 30,0000 years ago.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. Neanderthals made the same stone tools wherever they were, from Central Asia to Western Europe.
to a common ancestor of all the mitochondria that exist today. But Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA go much further back to a common ancestor, half a million years or so. So they look quite different in their mitochondrial genome.
How often does it match one African and the other African? Since Neanderthals had never been in Africa, there is no reason for Neanderthal to be more close to one African than another African. It should be equally distant.
It's not frozen. But we were able to sequence the genome from this girl, too, and were quite surprised to see that it was not the Neanderthal and not the modern human. It has a common origin with Neanderthals , but far back, 200,000, 250,000 years back.
who was the voice of Elmer Fudd, had just died. So they got in somebody else to do the voice and the voice is like pathetic, "Bugs Bunny" It's really bad and Bugs Bunny is like a Neanderthal so they drew him a strange way. It's ugly looking. It's got the wrong voice for Elmer Fudd. It's a Robert McKimsom. It's a very late one. It's like oy - this is like, like to me the worst Bugs Bunny cartoon. In case you were wondering.
had language. For sure they talked to one another. It's impossible that they didn't. The point came when they did, they did. And the Neanderthals , 800,000 years of rural life in Europe, they had to deal with the Ice Age, they all lived together, they bring up their children. You think they couldn't speak anything? They have the same apparatus.
They have a good fact there. That Neanderthals could communicate in a way that, there is a lion and this lion is dangerous, we should be aware of it, and that's it.
And that was that it's mainly men who write to us and self-identify and very few women who write and say they are Neanderthals . And so I presented this as my research to my group, in counting emails. And they said, ah, it's just ascertainment.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. Then Neanderthals to modern humans, Denisovans to modern humans.
And then I do that. And he's a Neanderthal , but he communicates well.
So, for the mammoth, we would map it to an Asian elephant. And for the Neanderthal , we were able to map it to a human. We take these broken fragments, and we match them where they go, using this genome sequence as a guide to figure out where they go.
The whole time. The whole time he sat there reading a book by himself. The guys a neanderthal .
to this specimen, which is a Neanderthal , but it's not just any Neanderthal . It's the Neanderthal that was found in 1856 in the Neander Valley and gave its name to this group of humans. And we were really lucky, I think, that the first Neanderthal we studied was really the type specimen that gave its name to these guys.
And we were really lucky, I think, that the first Neanderthal we studied was really the type specimen that gave its name to these guys. Because whatever Neanderthal we since have studied, that there's always some paleontologist who comes and say, ah, it's a little too gracile, a little too robust.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. turned out to be Neanderthal .
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. close to the Neanderthal , say, in an individual, in me, those fragments are also particularly different from everyone else in Europe.
The name is working its way into respectability. Not just Neanderthal but a couple of others that were different.
from this language. As you probably know, before Homo sapiens ruled the world, there were other Homos who inhabited our world. These were like Neanderthals , Homo habilis, or even there was Homo denisova. It was a special species of homos who were living in Siberia.
It's a few million years. Here's the Neanderthals . That was about 100,000 years ago. Maybe things were happening here, but not very interesting.
But our big interest was, really, Neanderthals as our closest relatives. And so Neanderthals appear 300,000, 400,000 years ago, and then exist in Europe and Western Asia until they become extinct something like 30,000 years ago in connection with that present-day humans appear.
And the other idea is that when modern humans come to these regions, they do eventually replace this forms, but they do mix with them. So that Neanderthals would have contributed genetically to present-day Europeans and these other forms in Asia, the present-day Asians. So you can see this as a sliding scale from total replacement, 0% contribution from these earlier guys, to a sliding scale to more and more of that.
it was lying there in the sediments in the cave. So our very best Neanderthals have sampling like 3%, 3.5% DNA. So we then managed to raise some money to over five years work a lot on the technology from which we can extract
With fragments just being 20 bases, are they unique enough to figure out whether something is the same gene or-- Yes. Or could the Neanderthals have had the genes which are completely different from humans but which are-- Yeah. So first of all, if Neanderthals had something that at all doesn't exist in the human genome today, we would be totally blind to it.
called the Denisovans, after this Denisova Cave where they were found. Just like Neanderthals were named after the first place where they were found. And since then, we have worked on new techniques to be even more efficient in extracting tiny amounts of DNA.
And there were three different groups of scientist trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. And I don't think cloning a Neanderthal is a good idea at all.
20%-- less than 10% percent of the DNA that we want is actually the DNA from the host. If you've heard of the Neanderthal genome that was published recently, the first Neanderthal genome sequence, they used a couple of different bones. And none of those bones had more than 1% Neanderthal DNA in them.
It's not quite typical. But if this is not a Neanderthal , then Neanderthals don't exist. So with the technology at the time, we retrieved a part of that mitochondrial genome with great effort, short little pieces, many, many times over,
And the machines have also gotten better in how much they can sequence. We looked through a lot of different Neanderthal sites and bones to find the ones with the most DNA in them. And it described a lot of little problems in running a group of different forms of expertise to actually get this done.
If there is a contribution, on average Neanderthals were more similar to Europeans that to people in Africa. So we then had the Neanderthal genome. And we needed to compare to present-day genomes and look for small signals.
So we had to test this first, say we compare the two present-day people to Africans, then find all the places where they differ in their genome. And then we for the Neanderthal . How often does it match one African and the other African?
So we get it from our mothers and not from the fathers. So if it was particularly Neanderthal men who contributed to the modern human gene pool, it would also bias against mitochondrial DNA. And, of course, you can say even by normal consideration, saying if you have hybrids, you would, of course, expect the babies to stay with their mothers.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. So we now have a very good Neanderthal genome also that we'll sequence many times over to very high quality.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. And what we then find in this Neanderthal is that we find huge segments-- this is 19 million bases here-- where the two chromosomes are identical.
creatures. They have on average bigger brains than us. The probably one of the biggest fossil craniums that's ever been found was neanderthal . They, as I said, they had imagination, because they buried their dead. They had language. The puzzle--and yet they, their technology did not progress. It remained very similar until the last few thousand years, before they went extinct. And their numbers didn't change. They had nothing like the kind of
page and two um it it um it had a natural narrative to it you could see this character who starts out a perfect Neanderthal learning a bit about how to do this thing called fatherhood and developing and it didn't take that much
He only had one, not very interesting, black and white diagram in his book. Huxley had pictures of apes and neanderthals and stuff. And Darwin shied away, as you know, from talking about human origins.
one idea is modern humans come out of Africa, meet these guys in Europe and Asia, and replace them with no mixture whatsoever. That there's no contribution from Neanderthals to Europeans today, for example. And the other idea is that when modern humans come to these regions, they do eventually replace this forms, but they do mix with them.
together with people at Broad and another group in Seattle, have independently now designed a pretty efficient algorithm to go over present-day human genomes and say which parts actually come from Neanderthals . And if you do that in thousands of genomes of present-day people, you will find regions nowadays where we see no Neanderthal contribution although we would
the Neanderthal and not the modern human. It has a common origin with Neanderthals , but far back, 200,000, 250,000 years back. And since then, Neanderthals have a long, long independent history.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. So there's actually no evidence that Neanderthals or the other early humans ever spread across water where you don't see land on the other side.
Apple, Pandora, all these people are collecting this information. And the artists themselves is still living like a Neanderthal , right, in terms of, like, data. It's like, OK, I've got this song.
If you've heard of the Neanderthal genome that was published recently, the first Neanderthal genome sequence, they used a couple of different bones. And none of those bones had more than 1% Neanderthal DNA in them. That's pretty standard, especially when you're not coming from a kind of cold region.
So in this sliding scale of things, it's really here. There are no humans today that run around with a Neanderthal mitochondrial genome. It's total replacement, no contribution.
taking various types of errors that occur in these sequences and so on into account. And we ended up with a first view or the Neanderthal genome in 2010, then where we had seen a little over half of the genome at least once from these fragments.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. One of these four relationships must been for this Neanderthal individual.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. But now and again we then find new Neanderthal bones.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. But when I get really close to the Neanderthal , then suddenly I'm more different from everyone else.