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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He was a prehistoric man, probably a man. And he was the first person to convince his fellow Neanderthals to go out hunting together rather than clubbing them over the head. And that is these two basic instincts we have for survival.
Since the beginning of history, human society has been held together by a common language and frame of reference provided by the shared communal experience of storytelling. From Neanderthals sitting around a campfire, to the classic Greek plays, to the commoners assembling for Shakespeare, to the works of Hitchcock and Spielberg playing for packed movie theaters, those shared communal experiences are what held our society together.
So you need to wait till I do more stuff. So right now I'm actually working on a book about Neanderthals . I'm just trying to go as far opposite from science fiction, "Star Wars" as I can.
Yeah. It could be a character. So you've mentioned you're going to work on Neanderthals . Are there any other franchises you might explore?
or impending children of your own. And it's now clear that humans and Neanderthals hybridized to a limited extent.
But one way, the most intuitive one, is to say, well, if there was a contribution from Neanderthals to present-day people in Europe, we would, of course, expect Europeans today to share more genetic variance with Neanderthals than people in Africa, where there have never been Neanderthals . So they couldn't have contributed there.
And we know that in the Middle East, there were Neanderthals . So if these early modern humans mixed with Neanderthals and then became the ancestors of everybody outside Africa, they can sort of carry with them out into the world this Neanderthal contribution also to regions where Neanderthals never existed to the extent that 1% to 2%
And lots of people write to us. And a lot of people write and self-identify as Neanderthals or volunteer to give us blood samples or things. And after a while, reading this mail, I started seeing a pattern.
We're very interested in other forms of humans, also. So there are lots of other forms of Neanderthals one finds that one can hope to study now. And we work together with Russian colleagues that excavate in Siberia and particularly then in this cave, Denisova Cave, in southern Russia
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. So this is the first time, actually, that only based on the genome sequence we define a new group of extinct humans that we then
Chimps are terrible, terrible people. 850,000 years ago, before Neanderthals , before we even got around to being properly sophisticated and having royal standards of Ur,
But fortunately it worked out well. And much later, any time you read about Neanderthals and whether they mated with humans, where they came from, chances are it came from his lab, the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.
And that is that we know from finding bones that there were other forms of humans around since a long time, since 2 million years at that time. So most famously, there were Neanderthals in Europe and Western Asia. In Eastern Asia, there were other forms of now extinct humans that are less well described.
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,
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. But that is probably very little such material there.
as people in Europe. 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.
But people outside Africa have this extra component in their genome, a tiny little part that is deeper diverged, yet very similar to the Neanderthal genome. So that's really the only reasonable explanation for that is from Neanderthals . So the question is, all three must have been fertile, and can we estimate how fertile they were?
Because I went back and looked at the emails again. And there are plenty of women who write and say they are married to Neanderthals actually. Whereas so far not a single man has claimed he's married to a Neanderthal woman.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. We can ask, as for the Neanderthals , did they contribute to present-day people?
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. So it would be very interesting to see if that's a general pattern in Neanderthals when we get more genomes in the future.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. If we say things that we all have in common and the Neanderthals are difference, it's just 30,000.
This person lived tens of thousands of years ago. So there are people like George Church at Harvard who have suggested we should clone Neanderthals .
a big gut, so you can have a bigger brain etc. etc. But it comes too early in the story. Even language, we now know Neanderthals probably had the same mutations in the genome that facilitate language that we did. Which means that our common ancestor with Neanderthals 400,000 or so years ago probably had incipient language. So, it doesn't look like language had quite the impact we often thought it did.
Get up every 10 minutes or so. And it's not unsurprising that around the same time when people were first finding the first skeletons of Neanderthals that the Neanderthals were basically
And as we were migrating out of our birthplace in East Africa, we encountered our sibling species-- other hominin species, other human-like species that had migrated out of Africa before us and were living in Europe and Central Asia-- the Neanderthals , who you've probably already heard of. But there were also the Denisovans, a whole species of humanity, sharing the world with us.
And there were three different groups of scientist trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. So there's a chapter in the book about them that you just mentioned-- --that includes Neanderthals , and it's very interesting.
And there were three different groups of scientist trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. Now, I think by extension as we learn more and more about Neanderthals , we're learning that these weren't some primitive savages.
or impending children of your own. Again, to calibrate it, the difference between humans and Neanderthals , modern humans and Neanderthals
So these giant ground sloths, for example, were in the North and South America, or mammoths and mastodons and things like that. 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