00:00:08
Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening to ust, you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com. All Right, everybody, it’s finally half and a half years of talking about it. We have our name. We have Neanderthal experts in the room. This is the white. This is the white, my white whale. This is this is my you know, my Moby Dick story. I’ve said for years I want to talk to some people that actually know something about Neanderthals.
00:00:58
Speaker 2: And here you are these Okay, they have a book.
00:01:03
Speaker 1: It’s well first names, Dimitra, Papa Gianni is how it’s spelled, Papa Yanni, Dimitra, Papayanni and Mike Morse. And they have a book that’s in its third edition. So the Neanderthals Rediscovered how modern science is rewriting their story. It’s in its third edition it was originally published in twenty twenty three. They were just explaining to me that, oh, sorry, I got that written right, or sorry my fault originally publishing two thousand and thirteen originally. But and this is part of partly why you’re here, our understanding of Neanderthal culture has changed so much that in that time you’ve had to really overhaul the book and make major changes. Right, So, something that happened a long time ago, our understanding of it has changed so much that it’s caused you to constantly need to go in and update your work.
00:02:00
Speaker 3: At some point, Demitra said, we really need to update this every three years if we want to stay current. It’s hard to do that, but you know we’re doing the best weekend.
00:02:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it’s it’s so rapidly evolving. And part of the reason I want to talk to you about Neanderthal is not just in my lifetime, but in the last few years, I’ve started to feel like I had this image of Neanderthal culture and in a minute, I want you to explain what Neanderthal is, but I’ve had this image of Neanderthal culture and the way it’s portrayed in like cartoons and things. You just picture people with big clubs and they’re hitting each other with clubs and dragging.
00:02:35
Speaker 2: Their knuckles along the ground.
00:02:37
Speaker 1: And then I would read just as a just an interested party reading common news sites, I would read like, oh, they seem that they had art. Oh perhaps they had jewelry. Perhaps they made it with humans. You know, they were divers, they were they were collecting shellfish, they suffered from swimmers year whatever. And I don’t know how much of all that is true, but it’s just been that I started to visualize them less like some kind of glorified ape and more like a you know, they just became more human to the part where I could almost picture that that’s something I had never thought of before, that they were there was personalities and right, and so as my understanding has changed, I just wanted to have someone in who could speak to like, who really were they?
00:03:31
Speaker 2: What happened to them?
00:03:32
Speaker 1: What did they do? You know if I saw one across the room, would I instantly know that I was buy something different? This is what I want to talk about, this is why you’re here. But first off, and I don’t care any of these questions. I don’t care who answers it but will we say Neanderthal What is that? What does that mean?
00:03:55
Speaker 4: They were our answers, stores But they were part of our answers, part of what came before us as humans. They were essentially an offshoot of our direct evolutionary line, a side branch of which a little bit remains in us. For most of their part, they lived at the same time as our ancestors, but in different parts of the world. Later on they met and they were mostly in Europe, but again later in their span of existence in the Old World, expanded towards Asia, towards the Middle East and Siberia, and they chronologically what we call pre Neanderthals, or the earliest forms of Neanderthals, could be going back as far as half a million years. But when we start seeing kind of Neanderthals with the features of that we identify as Neanderthals, is closer to about three hundred and fifty thousand years, give or take.
00:05:11
Speaker 5: And they.
00:05:14
Speaker 4: Disappeared from Europe let’s say around forty thousand years in the case there is give or take in new dates and so on. So this is the times fun that we are talking about. In terms of their morphology, they were shorter, than us, a little bit shorter than ours, and bulky built. They were some They had some distinct features like the short, shorter than us limbs proportionally also smaller than us. And they had big barrel shaped chests. And their faces were if you take one of our faces, you kind of pull it forward, so you will have this part sticking out farther. Ah, they their noses were sticking out farther. Their brow ridges were bigger. They didn’t have chins, so can you kind of imagine a.
00:06:14
Speaker 5: More bird like profile.
00:06:18
Speaker 4: They didn’t have chins. No, we don’t even know why we have chins.
00:06:23
Speaker 2: It’s not clear why.
00:06:25
Speaker 5: We don’t know.
00:06:25
Speaker 4: There are many theories of why we have chins and what they do. But they did not have chins.
00:06:29
Speaker 1: That yeah, uh, anotho could kick a normal person like a nanothal could beat up.
00:06:37
Speaker 4: Yeah, probably an animal woman could beat up a modern human man.
00:06:42
Speaker 2: Just across the board like big strong.
00:06:44
Speaker 4: No not probably not across the board, depending on their lifestyle.
00:06:49
Speaker 6: But they were very muscular, very strong bones.
00:06:53
Speaker 1: I noticed you say, Neander tal Yes, we’re going to give you the long answer to this. Please, what do you do? What do you go with? So?
00:07:00
Speaker 3: I grew up saying Neanderthal because I grew up in the United States where that’s normal. Then we lived in the UK for fifteen years where everyone says neander Tal. My view is they’re both right. It doesn’t know Neanderthal is going to come back and correct us, so we’re good. But I think it’s worth going to the etymology.
00:07:22
Speaker 1: Please, because there’s a valley in Germany and exactly they call that the Neanderthal Valley or something.
00:07:28
Speaker 3: So the German word for valley is tall. Oh, and originally it was spelled with the thh, but the h was silent, so in German it’s tall. And this is something that we all should know because virtually everyone watching this says says the German word for valley every day. And now I’m going to go into the etymology. So Neanderthals came from the neander Valley. That’s where they were, That’s where the major discovery was made. And that valley was named after a guy named Joachim Neander. He wrote hymns, and so they named the valley after him, the neander Valley, the Neanderthal. There was another tall there’s another valley called the Joachim’s Tall where they had a mint, and so the money that was made from the Joachims tall was called the Joachims Tallers, and that got shortened to taller. Oh and so that’s where the that’s where the word dollar comes from.
00:08:30
Speaker 1: Oh really, okay, so we say.
00:08:33
Speaker 3: Dollar, we don’t say thaler. You can say Neanderthal if you want. It’s spelled with an H in English. I think it’s easier to say Neanderthal.
00:08:44
Speaker 1: One.
00:08:44
Speaker 3: The parint is once you start saying it one way, it’s very hard to change.
00:08:47
Speaker 2: Once we were talking change two times.
00:08:49
Speaker 6: Yeah, there you go.
00:08:51
Speaker 3: Once we were talking with a geneticist and we were saying Neanderthal and Denise Evin and he was saying Neanderthal and Dennis Savin and we understood each other. No one was correcting. It was fine. It doesn’t matter how you pronounce these things.
00:09:06
Speaker 2: Got it.
00:09:07
Speaker 1: Good to get that cleared up.
00:09:09
Speaker 6: Yeah, we’re fine.
00:09:10
Speaker 1: So over the whatever. Since the days of twenty three and twenty three and me came out and any person could send in you know, saliva and get a genetic profile of themselves, people would even call it, uh, you know, I did I twenty three and me myself, I did twenty three and mes whatever, and all of a sudden everyone is talking about what percent nand or fall they are or it would give it to you like less than average, more than average. I was disappointed to see that. I’m I think less than average. I was disappointed to see what do you guys buy that? And what are people really saying when they say that? Right when people look and they get their profile, they see that they’re blank percent of Neanderthal descent.
00:10:06
Speaker 2: What are we saying?
00:10:08
Speaker 4: So it’s it’s probably it’s accurate. So the percentage you were given, the personage I was given as I’m sure it’s accurate. There are other things in the twenty three and meters and this kind of sequencing that I’m not so comfortable with with the conclusions.
00:10:28
Speaker 5: You know, I’m like thirty percent Italian.
00:10:30
Speaker 4: It doesn’t really work this way, but the Neanderthal bit is one of the most reliable things they What it means though, is basically that we all, all of us who have our answers stores outside Sub Saharan Africa have a component of neanderital DNA. But my, let’s say three percent, My three percent of nanatal DNA is not necessarily the same as yours or his and if you pull them all together you can actually you can actually reconstruct about At this point it’s about I think seventy percent of nanatal DNA. So we have different bits of nanatal DNA in US I see, and for most of it we don’t know what it does or if it does anything. And essentially, I mean, it doesn’t mean all that much. It simply means that some a little bit of our ancestors lives in US because they interpret with us. And actually even even modern humans who come from some Saharan Africa they also have a tiny bit of nanatal DNA. That’s one of the very recent findings. We thought that they had none. They had a tiny bit because at some point there was migration back to Africa and intermixing.
00:12:10
Speaker 5: But it’s different.
00:12:11
Speaker 4: So the big genetic difference in US in modern humans generally is that everyone who is from sub Saharan Africa has much bigger genetic diversity than the rest of us and a tiny bit of nanital DNA. But the big story about them genetically is that they are much more diverse than us because we as a species developed in sub Saharan Africa. And it’s a whole different story how we’re where and when. But at some or at different points, it wasn’t only one point. There were several probably waves of leaving Africa, some less successful than others. But basically you have what you call a bottleneck event. Imagine that you have the big bottle in Africa and then just a segment of that population leaves. And this is what the modern humans, as Homo sapiens, who come from outside sub Saharan Africa, we are much genetically diverse than the sub Saharan Africa much, yes, much less diverse genetically and because of us, the stores mixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans. We have that little bit of Neanderthal DNA. For most of it, we don’t know what it does. And for most of DNA, we don’t know what they like. If you take a specific gene, we still don’t know. For some of them, we don’t know they make cause this disease or that. But generally we’re not yet at the point we’ll say, oh, this gene does this, We don’t know yet. It’s like a language that we cannot quite read yet.
00:13:54
Speaker 3: I think there’s a there’s a bigger question about like are you above average or below average Neanderthal. And to me, the the big answer is most of the world outside of Africa is about the same. It’s like two percent plus or minus a little bit. I mean originally when when they started, when you when you first could send your DNA off to get its sequence, it would be between one and four percent, and you could get excited by that. When they’ve refined it, it’s downs it’s mostly towards two percent.
00:14:25
Speaker 7: And everywhere around the world outside of Africa, yeah, which which to me tells an amazing story, which is that it’s you know, when that bottleneck of Homo sapiens left Africa, they must have intermixed very quickly with.
00:14:37
Speaker 3: Neanderthals, because you know, yeah, Europe is not that different from East Asia for example, or you know, for or even the people that made it to the Americans. It’s all about the same percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
00:14:52
Speaker 1: That that a little bit surprised me because I would picture as humans are spreading around the world, I would picture that some bands of people, some clans, social or whatever social organization structures there were. I would picture that some would go in whatever direction and have a different level of running, a different level of integration with Neanderthals and then carry that off in whatever direction they went, especially people that went out and colonized islands that I would just guess that if you went around the world, you’d find much greater concentrations of you know whatever in some area because those people that became those people had just a different experience.
00:15:46
Speaker 2: I think that does that Does that make any sense at all?
00:15:48
Speaker 3: Well, the numbers were so small back then, so this so we went to see this geneticist, Josh Aky okay, and I don’t quite know what these numbers mean, but he said the Homo sapien breeding population was about ten thousand. Don’t but so that doesn’t mean there were ten thousand human beings, but in terms of like who is of an age and ability to reproduce, and the Neanderthal breeding population they think was about one thousand at the time that they met, so it was about ten to one. And in fact, from the from very early on, if they you know, the kind of hybrids that they find have are modern humans with about ten percent Neanderthal DNA. So if as they’re coming out of Africa they’re part of the same breeding population, then that ten percent kind of spreads around to everyone, and then it’s been slowly getting whittled down.
00:16:44
Speaker 6: It’s like it’s being selected outood.
00:16:46
Speaker 3: So I mean another geneticists used the term toxic, that Neanderthal DNA is toxic.
00:16:52
Speaker 1: It it that’s a brand. That’s a branding problem.
00:17:00
Speaker 6: You know, as life goes on, we have less and less of it?
00:17:05
Speaker 1: Got it? Got it?
00:17:06
Speaker 2: Do you? How do you imagine? How do you imagine? What is the interaction? I mean, I know we don’t know. I know, I know we don’t.
00:17:15
Speaker 1: Know, But how do how do we imagine it was?
00:17:16
Speaker 2: The interaction?
00:17:20
Speaker 1: Was it around that Neanderthals are kidnapping Homo sapient females, Is that they’re living in bliss, they’re living in mixed communities. There’s sort of a there’s sort of a warfare element to it of taking captives and breeding with those captives. What are some of the like what are some of the guesses? What are some of the guesses of or they go like, Wow, these people are amazing looking. I’d love to breathe one of them.
00:17:52
Speaker 4: I think we can, I think we can safely say that there wasn’t only one scenario. Okay, and you know, people met and it could be a whole range of things from a chance encounter or a chance mating episode two. I wouldn’t say living together because culturally we don’t see that level. But maybe, actually, now that I think of it, there has. You probably referred to a kind of a recent story just a few months ago about a sex bias. Now the sex bias in that case, they mean it basically how sexes are represented in the DNA, not.
00:18:42
Speaker 1: Necessarily primarily male neanderthals breeding with female No.
00:18:47
Speaker 5: No, no no.
00:18:49
Speaker 4: So the bias could be that you had more Neanderthal men interbreeding with more modern human women. But it could also be that the Neanderthal female DNA was filtered out because it was not you know what you called toxic got it.
00:19:14
Speaker 1: So it’s not conclusive to me.
00:19:17
Speaker 3: The main takeaway of all this, and it’s not just humans, but it’s all mammals, is that they’re just they’re very promiscuous like this if you can imagine sexual combinations that are happening somewhere in nature, and so maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was a big surprise when it turned out we carry Neanderthal DNA in us, but maybe it just shouldn’t have been maybe you know, there’s just mixing.
00:19:44
Speaker 1: Everywhere, got it. Yeah, like our r being shocked about it was sort of looking at human exceptionalism and not considering what you see in the in the broader community of mammals in general.
00:19:58
Speaker 2: Do you they had a language? You think they were talking?
00:20:02
Speaker 6: Absolutely?
00:20:03
Speaker 2: How complex?
00:20:06
Speaker 3: That’s that’s one of those words that So for for years, the idea was that what you know, the question is what makes us special? And it’s really disturbing that you’ve got these really strong, you know, Neanderthal’s really strong, kind of strange faces, slightly different bodies living about the same time that Homo sapiens were. But but we’ve got to explain what makes us special. So for years the idea was, well, we have complex language and they must not have. And then well that it turns out they did have language, Well, ours was more complex. I just think it’s one of those words to hide behind, like we’re still special. I tell you we’re still special. Yeah, you know we, I mean we at some point we need to get into the whole. There’s a whole theory, the social brain hypothesis and which which is a theory that explains when lange which should have first appeared, and it kind of predates both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals according to that theory. Well we’ll get into that, but there’s this idea we still need to keep something for ourselves. And yes, modern humans, Homo sapiens do stuff that Neanderthals didn’t do. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to see that in language, perhaps, but not necessarily.
00:21:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the word complex language doesn’t that doesn’t mean anything.
00:21:30
Speaker 3: Well it to me, it’s it’s a way to hide behind we’re but but our language is better than their language, Like because for a long time as they didn’t have language, we have we’re the only species that has language. Well it turns out we’re not so, but ours we’re the only species that has this really really complex language.
00:21:48
Speaker 2: Well how do we know they how do you know they had language?
00:21:50
Speaker 1: Do you? I mean? Like, so let’s look, if you’re looking at bones, how do you how do you know that they were talking to each other?
00:21:57
Speaker 3: Because the bones that you’re looking at, well, the bones that you’re looking at are the skulls and its brain size is the big thing. But within the brain is pre prefrontal cortex and so this part so yeah, so there is so there.
00:22:17
Speaker 6: Let me just rewind.
00:22:18
Speaker 3: There was a day that when Demetro was a post doc at Southampton in the UK, she came home one day and she’s like, Mike, I saw this guy, Robin Dunbar speak and he explains everything, and I’m like okay, and you were just like bursting with excitement. It’s like, okay, what does he explain? You’re like, why do people sing at soccer matches? Why do people sing in church? Why do we have language? What’s our social organization? It all comes together in this one big theory. So here’s the thing. So, so the theory is that so prefrontal cortex is correlated with group size. So if if you go if you look at chimpanzees, which is a nice proxy for our ancest there’s pre you know, pre Homo, our oldest ancestors from six million years ago. They live in groups of fifty to fifty five individuals. So how do they keep the group together, how do they know that they’re in that group?
00:23:15
Speaker 6: They do grooming.
00:23:16
Speaker 3: They spend a lot of the day, you know, picking little insects off each other’s backs. If you’ve ever had someone rub your back, it’s incredibly relaxing. You know, tho’s brain changes, there’s enderfins. You feel very close to this person. So in chimpanzees, they groom each other to the point that they all feel like one unit together.
00:23:37
Speaker 1: Got it.
00:23:38
Speaker 3: So as your prefrontal cortex grows, as the brain gets bigger, the group size gets bigger. So we today have a natural group size of one hundred and fifty, which is called the Dunbar number. And this and the incredible there’s so many incredible things about the Dunbar number. My favorite is that it’s a it’s a hard stop at one fifty. So if you have like a group of one hundred and fifty one, it will break up into two groups. It’s just our brains can’t. We don’t have the capacity for a group larger than one hundred and fifty. And so you’ll see this in the ways companies are organized, the way the military is organized. I once experienced this myself when I went to a conference that had one hundred and thirty five people there, and after a couple of days, you could walk up to anyone in that conference and just say, you know, hi, I’m Mike. Here’s what I’m doing. You know, who are you and you could just have the most amazing conversation. The next day you would feel like old friends. If there were a thousand people at that conference and I walked up to someone and said, Hi, I’m Mike, they might think who is this guy? You know, like coming up to me like this, So we obviously live in.
00:24:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s interesting that the size of the group. It does.
00:24:50
Speaker 2: The size of the group.
00:24:54
Speaker 1: Informs or dictates what would be an appropriate way to approach somebody.
00:25:00
Speaker 4: People that you can maintain daily contact with, and that’s fairly small because you have to.
00:25:05
Speaker 5: You have to.
00:25:06
Speaker 4: You have to think of it in terms of how much time, how much of your own time and energy you have to spend to maintain that contact. There is the bigger group of people that you are in contact with regularly, like your friends, but they don’t live in the same town. Maybe every once a couple of weeks you exchange a text message, or there’s something like a sport sporting event that you suddenly interact with a lot for a small number amount of time, and then you don’t forget about them, but you kind of don’t interact with them for like a month, but they’re still there. They’re still in your brain that you still spend some time with them. And there is the people back then when Robin Dunmar wrote this theory that you call the Christmas card group the people that the hundred plus that you know. You consider them your friends, you consider them part of your net work. But you may not even talk to them in the year. Still you’ll send them.
00:26:04
Speaker 1: A card, yes, your wedding if you have a good budget, So.
00:26:08
Speaker 4: Think of it this way, or if you even in a dinner party, if you have a small dinner party with four, that’s five. If you have a bigger group, eventually people will kind of split naturally into smaller groups. And the idea is that in an evolutionary sense, though, if you project it in an evolutionary sense, you can’t do the sort of grooming that primates do with a group of even fifty people. So what do you do instead to maintain those connections? And he says you gossip. That’s where language comes in. Okay, that instead of spending time one on one grooming, you can spend time with a bigger group at a time, and you spend that time, you know, telling stories, discussing things, gossiping about the people and that’s how you maintain that network in terms of time. Is a more efficient language gives you a more efficient way to maintain that network, and then you build other things in like you know, now we call it dinner parties. Back then it was I killed a big deer. Do you want to come over and help me with butchering it and take some of the food? And I know that you will invite me over when you do the same thing, and so so’s.
00:27:31
Speaker 3: At some point between the kind of fifty five maximum of chimpanzees and one hundred and fifty of us, there had to be language to maintain that group size, and Robin Dunbar puts it somewhere between a million years ago and five hundred thousand years ago.
00:27:45
Speaker 1: Do you feel that if you look at the timing of humans leaving Africa? Okay, would the timing be that if the Neanderthals had a language they spoke Neanderthal, let’s say, would it have been incomprehensible to Homo sapiens?
00:28:10
Speaker 2: I mean, like, was the right amount of.
00:28:12
Speaker 1: Time gone by that they would have developed these entirely different languages?
00:28:16
Speaker 2: And by that, I mean if you look.
00:28:17
Speaker 1: At when when humans were spreading around the world. Europeans developed a certain skin tone, language families, right, so that when they finally come together with Native Americans all those years later, they’re coming from a commonplace. When they finally re meet, the languages are incomprehensible, The cultures are largely incompatible.
00:28:46
Speaker 2: They look totally different.
00:28:48
Speaker 1: They don’t even recon they don’t barely recognize each other that they have there’s a reluctance to even accept them as fellow human beings. Right, So, would like Neanderthal language out in Western Europe would have been probably something totally different than were Homo sapiens spoke when they met.
00:29:07
Speaker 2: They weren’t yelling hello.
00:29:10
Speaker 1: Across the valley.
00:29:11
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think when we talk about Nanatal language, I think we I don’t think they had the same old Nanators had the same language. I mean, it’s completely theoretical now, but I can’t imagine that people who were not in regular contact would speak the exact the same language. They probably had something similar to maybe our families of languages, or you know, groups that were in western in southwest France, we probably had different language from groups in Germany.
00:29:50
Speaker 1: So different Neanderthal communities might have had totally different words.
00:29:56
Speaker 4: From what we know for how language works. Unless you are regularly interacting with another group, you wouldn’t have the same language. I mean even now French and German are part both in the European languages and have a relatively very recent answerst or common ancestor as languages, but you can’t.
00:30:19
Speaker 5: They’re not the same.
00:30:20
Speaker 4: I mean, it takes.
00:30:21
Speaker 5: It takes.
00:30:24
Speaker 4: It’s it’s closer than Greek and German, which also again in the European languages, but it takes time to learn it. Even if you have like Russian and Creation the closer generat in terms of evolution as languages, they’re closer together, but it’s there. You can’t just walk from one country to the other and just speak as if you know you speak their language, it will be easier to understand it, if it will be faster to learn it, but it’s not. I just can’t. You know, Neanderthals in Siberia I wouldn’t speak if they met an an adult in France, they wouldn’t speak the same.
00:31:04
Speaker 2: That’s a good poets. I had a linguist explain that.
00:31:06
Speaker 1: I had a linguist one time say that if you had at the time of the American Civil War. If at the end of the American Civil War you had taken the Mason Dixon Line and built a sort of impenetrable wall that prevented communication with people south of the Mason Dixon line and people north of the Mason Dixon line, he said, in that amount of time, they would now not be able to communicate.
00:31:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, it doesn’t take a load of time.
00:31:34
Speaker 2: All the words would have gone different.
00:31:36
Speaker 3: Look at it the other way, which is when you’re talking about hunter gatherers, they’re on the move, they’re traveling a lot, and they’re going to run into other people, whether it’s Neanderthals running into Neanderthals, modern humans running into Neanderthals, modern humans running into modern humans. You’re going to run into other people, and the first thing you have to figure out is are these people going to kill us? And it’s it’s kind of it’s a human capability to make friends and communicate, whether or not you share a language, and I think the language can come.
00:32:08
Speaker 6: You know, you can learn each other’s languages.
00:32:10
Speaker 3: Later, you can you can embed, you can live with them, and you know, after whatever amount of time, there are going to be people that that are fluent in both. But to me, it’s not a question of can we understand. I mean, that’s like a modern problem. You know if I if I travel somewhere, am I going to understand the locals? But if you’re a hunter gatherer, you’re kind of doing this all the time.
00:32:35
Speaker 1: I know, language is hard because it’s like there’s no record, there’s no record of their words. But let’s talk about something. There is a record.
00:32:43
Speaker 5: What we do have.
00:32:44
Speaker 4: We have some anatomical stuff like from Neanderthals that we know. We know that they could produce sounds and a big range of sounds. How it sounded like maybe it was more high pitched than ours.
00:32:58
Speaker 3: Really, Yeah, that’s yeah, there’s squeaky there’s big guys with squeaky little voice.
00:33:03
Speaker 5: Yeah, because of how.
00:33:06
Speaker 6: That’s squeaky little voice, that’s that’s the theory.
00:33:09
Speaker 5: That’s the theory. Yes.
00:33:11
Speaker 4: But I think in terms of you know, if you met Ananderdal, of when an Anado met in modern humans, they probably it was probably mostly gestures to understand, to kind of understand each other and see who who this guy is gonna kill me or not? And one side, I don’t want to talk too much about modern humans because then we always did this service to nanadals because we always like, oh, you talk about us. But the question is, once you move more and you there are more people around and you interact with more people, how do you signal to them who you are and what you are or this is your land or this is your river? And that may be where the real the advantage of modern humans was because they thought they they came up, came up. They used ways that could have been kind of calling cards of who they are. It could be I’m wearing this necklace that has shells from uh, this coast, you know, it could be the Mediterranean coast. It could be the Black Sea coast. Or I have this, you know, this figurines, this portable art.
00:34:27
Speaker 5: What do they do?
00:34:28
Speaker 4: We don’t know what they did. What were they were they sign that you know we are here mhm?
00:34:36
Speaker 5: Or maybe even with art on rock art? Is that a sign that this is our group?
00:34:48
Speaker 4: So that yeah, So when we talked about complex language, what is a complex language and what is it? Is it vocabulary? Is it the syntax? Is it that you talk about abstract things? Is it that you can talk about yourself as a group versus the other group? And how do you signify that if you don’t, you know, you come across the other people, you don’t speak the same language, how do you tell them who you are?
00:35:18
Speaker 5: How do you tell them?
00:35:19
Speaker 4: Oh, we haven’t met, but I am friends with those other guys, and they gave me some of the shells in this necklace. So maybe that’s how you show it. Or I am strong and I have you know, I rule this land and you can see from the I don’t know the teeth of the animal that I’ve hung on my neck, that we can handle those things and we run this territory. You know, I’m speculating here, but this is ways that we try to read from artifacts and from material culture. What were they using this for and what are they trying to signify this way? If that’s a difference between the animals and modern humans, it’s not they Oh, I see you will we hunt together? That we are a group of twenty people in want to coordinate. Who is gonna you know, how we drive these animals to this narrow ravine, maybe to be able to hunt them better that I think we know from material culture that they could do. We know from the hunting they did. We know the number of animals that they killed. They were pretty good at that. They were pretty good at exploiting the resources together, sharing the food and so on. But the more you can call it sophisticated, complex, abstract of relating with people you don’t see maybe every day. That’s where modern humans probably had an advantage.
00:36:55
Speaker 1: Is there evidence that they ate each other? Yes, humans know that humans and Neanderthals were eating each other.
00:37:04
Speaker 6: With each other.
00:37:05
Speaker 3: There probably there’s lots of evidence that that Homo sapiens were eating Homo sapiens and that Neanderthals reading Neanderthals.
00:37:12
Speaker 6: But I don’t know if.
00:37:13
Speaker 2: There’s evidence that Homo sapians are eating Homo sapiens.
00:37:17
Speaker 3: It’s it’s incredibly well documented in almost every period of our past that cannibalism happened.
00:37:26
Speaker 1: But there’s not physical evidence of a Neanderthal camp site and among their artifacts are butchered Homo sapien remains.
00:37:37
Speaker 3: Huh, Because so there there are a lot, I mean, I think like half a dozen famous Neanderthal cannibalism sites, and mostly those are too old for there to be modern humans being a part of it.
00:37:58
Speaker 6: There was actually there was.
00:37:59
Speaker 3: A sight in Belgium that just came out a couple of weeks ago. That actually does fall into the timeframe that that modern humans would have been around. And it was like this little family that was butchered and eaten and.
00:38:15
Speaker 2: Butchered eating by who.
00:38:16
Speaker 6: Well you know, they didn’t leave their calling card, so we don’t.
00:38:20
Speaker 1: So we don’t someone butchered a family of modern humans. Someone butchered native family of Neanderthals, and the timing could be that it was modern humans, but we don’t know.
00:38:33
Speaker 4: Yeah, it could be, yes, but there is no indication that there were any modern humans nearby.
00:38:39
Speaker 2: But so it could have been by other Neanderthals.
00:38:42
Speaker 5: Yes, So.
00:38:45
Speaker 4: For modern humans, we have evidence of cannibalism, uh as he said, in old time periods, and it could It can be for because of servation, It can be for ritualistic reasons.
00:39:01
Speaker 5: You kind of.
00:39:05
Speaker 4: You can honor the dead, honor the dead basically, yeah, or you keep a part of the dead. Or it could be even for this, you know, in a part of a war and displaying how ferocious and fearsome youre and so on. It’s the whole range, but most of it, I would I think, am I right? It’s not in a violent context in modern humans.
00:39:31
Speaker 5: For Neanderthals.
00:39:34
Speaker 4: We have sights with evidence of cannibalism from forty thousand years for and twenty thousand years even pre Neanderitals early how minutes in Europe before Neanderthals.
00:39:49
Speaker 3: The very oldest skull yeah, from in Europe at Aquerka Homo antecessor almost a million years old, and that was that was really Yeah, so the oldest homo of any kind in Europe was was eaten by other humans because.
00:40:08
Speaker 2: It has butcher marks on.
00:40:09
Speaker 6: It has marks, and.
00:40:12
Speaker 4: It has a bunch of marks. And also in the inside and France inside in Croatia that you can see that the bones are snapped and cut up exactly the same way that they snub and cut up the animal bones.
00:40:25
Speaker 1: Oh really, but that’s like an eating for food. I mean, if you look at like the history of go, look at the history of Great Lakes tribes, tribes along the Saint Lawrence, the Iroquois in New York, right, they would practice a widespread cannibalism related to warfare, meaning you’d catch prisoners and there was a sort of ritualistic cannibalism, very widespread, very well documented again and again and again, but it was usually tied to It wasn’t tied to like, boy, I’m hungry. It was tied to like a type of domination, right, perhaps some sort of religious element to it. But it wasn’t like I’m going out to get something to eat. I’ll go hunt down a human to eat. But with this case, that might be what was going on. It might be like you viewed them as a food source.
00:41:23
Speaker 3: Warfare is really is a really recent thing in terms of in terms of human behavior, like like organized warfare against other groups where you you you kill off a lot of people and you take control. That’s like one of the most recent Homo sapien behaviors to develop. That’s recently, so like twenty thirty thousand years what really?
00:41:52
Speaker 4: Yeah?
00:41:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you don’t think there were wars between Neanderthals and modern humans.
00:41:57
Speaker 3: It’s not that there were, well, there were fights, let’s say, because there’s always fights in battles, but in terms of let’s go and kill everybody, or let’s take the women and kill everyone else, that’s that’s a much more recent development.
00:42:13
Speaker 1: Like we make a big old plan and it’s got step one, step two, step three.
00:42:17
Speaker 3: But a lot of a lot of cannibalism is linked somehow to protein shortages. I mean, the biggest state example is the Aztec Empire, which you know was a very was you know, probably one of the at its heyday, was probably one of the biggest in the world before the conquest, and they they had kind of state organized cannibalism of prisoners of war. But they also, you know, they didn’t have a lot of other good ways to feed protein to the whole population.
00:42:50
Speaker 1: So you think it was it was that cannibalism in the Aztec was driven by like literally a need for food.
00:42:59
Speaker 3: This is now I was I was a graduate student in anthropology, and this is a very unpopular view in anthropology departments.
00:43:07
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, I know it happened. What I was telling you about the Great Lakes tribes that iqui it’s ridiculous, but it’s it’s it’s somehow controversial to talk about things that are like incredibly well documented.
00:43:19
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:43:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, well there’s always a reluctance because cannibalism is a is a slur against a group. Oh they practice cannibalism, that means they weren’t quite a civilized as us.
00:43:30
Speaker 2: I want to I want to clarify I don’t hold that opinion I mean.
00:43:34
Speaker 1: I don’t practice. I don’t.
00:43:35
Speaker 6: I don’t know practice.
00:43:36
Speaker 1: But like we’re talking about people live hundreds of years ago, I don’t hold it as a I don’t count it against them.
00:43:42
Speaker 3: Well, we can go to the store and buy as much meat as we want, but if you know, if there’s a certain kind of hunger, like if you can you can eat as much nuts and fruit and vegetables as you want, but if you haven’t had enough protein, there’s a certain kind of hunger that’s almost unbearable. Yeah, and yeah, I don’t it’s it’s it’s always been a part of our ancestors behavior. And and it could be you know, some respected elder died and you honor him by consuming everything and then everyone gets fed, or it could be.
00:44:19
Speaker 6: You know, as part of a as part of a battle against some group.
00:44:23
Speaker 3: I mean, so like this the site in Belgium I mentioned is like a Neanderthal family.
00:44:28
Speaker 1: We don’t know that there were the dynamics of the family.
00:44:32
Speaker 6: I think it was the.
00:44:36
Speaker 3: It was I think it was the men were closely related and the women had come in from somewhere else.
00:44:41
Speaker 6: But even that, we don’t group.
00:44:44
Speaker 3: There’s like six or so individuals, but We don’t know that they were all like slaughtered and butchered at the same time. It could be because things get preserved in caves that it could be the you know, and as you know, frankly, that’s a lot of meat. You know that six people is gonna feed hundreds, So you wouldn’t you wouldn’t kill six people in Neanderthal times purely for food. Maybe they maybe it was done one or two at a time and they just happened to Washington.
00:45:17
Speaker 1: How heavy was a Neanderthal if you had to.
00:45:20
Speaker 6: Guess, let’s say one hundred and fifty pounds.
00:45:24
Speaker 1: Okay, so I would say humans would have a poor yield like a deer fort. But I bet you humans have a super low yield, a sluper low meat yield.
00:45:37
Speaker 2: I bet.
00:45:38
Speaker 1: So if you have one hundred let’s say you have a one hundred and fifty pound Neanderthal, Let’s say you get fifty pounds. Yeah, it’s a lot. Fifty pounds of flesh off that sucker.
00:45:52
Speaker 3: Well, and the Aztecs could cook him into a soup. But Neanderthals didn’t exactly have big cauldrons, you know, to get it to really extremely.
00:46:02
Speaker 1: But that’s really interesting idea to think about it, they’d be like, that’s a lot of meat.
00:46:08
Speaker 4: The type of studies that it would be very Neanderthals wouldn’t be, or humans are not.
00:46:13
Speaker 5: Generally very nutritious to eat.
00:46:16
Speaker 4: I don’t know, because they’re generally lean. I don’t know, but I think the condoxt of starvation then that probably changes the equation. I mean, you asked earlier forty thousand modern humans may have been there, may have been nearby, and that may have increased the pressures on that population, on that small group of Neanderthals. And I mean just and as Mike said, we have these individuals in a cave, but a cave is not a reflection of what was actually happening, and it’s just that group. It’s whoever happened to be brought back to the cave, cut up, eaten up, and so on. You know, there probably were more people from that group over one hundred years, say who died and never didn’t die in the cave, never brought to the cave, because why would you do that unless you have you really want someone in the family to bury them properly and bring them in a cave.
00:47:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe they only brought the butchered people into the cave.
00:47:26
Speaker 1: Take a cave for instance from those time periods. Like with a Neanderthal site, do you have a bone bed or a debris pile or a midden where it has deer, it has cattle bones, it has sheep bones, and just interspersed interlaid with it are Neanderthal bones, meaning that they’re just routinely eating what I bring home today. Today I brought home a turtle. Yes, that brought a horse. Last week I brought home. Last week I brought home another Neanderthal. And it was just all treated the same or does it seem different somehow?
00:48:10
Speaker 4: It’s hard to tell. Like he just asked me, now, I was crapping it like that, And I said, who knows? Because crapping out, which is a site in Croatia that has.
00:48:19
Speaker 3: It has like thirty at least, I mean the numbers go back and forth, but probably thirty individual Neanderthals, a lot of whom were.
00:48:25
Speaker 2: Butchered in a Neanderthal camp well.
00:48:28
Speaker 6: In a cave site in a case.
00:48:29
Speaker 4: But I said, who knows, because it was excavated and almost completely excavated. The whole thing was dug out, excavated.
00:48:37
Speaker 6: And in like one hundred and twenty eight.
00:48:40
Speaker 4: Yeah, and probably if we have no idea basically, but they kept the human bones, they probably threw away a lot of the animal bones. Now we if we excavated it, Now, if we go really fine detail and see a lot of time to excavate it and actually see did they come from the same Yeah.
00:48:59
Speaker 1: There was by what they look at what they were looking for.
00:49:02
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was a bue. It was It wasn’t a bi It was that the methods were very different, and they just didn’t couldn’t look at this, didn’t want it, didn’t have the same questions that we have, couldn’t look at this level of detail, and we just you just can’t go back and reconstructed were in more recent excavations. You begin to ask those questions and you do things what I said, like what I said, that cut up the same way. And but then caves are not it’s not like you go in and do something this year or this spring, and then you go back in the fall or next thing and so on, and you can see that nicely laid out in layers. Caves are often this stuff is often compressed, and what you see in a slice like this could be a few hundred years, it would be a few thousand years. You can’t you can’t really go into that level of detail.
00:49:56
Speaker 2: Everything is kind of ground in together.
00:49:59
Speaker 4: Yes, uh again not always, but often in some cases you have in caves what could be burials of Neanderthals. There are even like in Sidron it was it wasn’t mixed together.
00:50:18
Speaker 5: We just know that they were. They ate those.
00:50:23
Speaker 3: As a cave in Spain, that’s another famous site of where it seems like a small group of closely related Neanderthals were butchered, but also but also butchered animal. But I mean, how do you know that it was butchered because the butchering looks just like the animal bones.
00:50:37
Speaker 4: Yeah, in a sense, they were not treated us more special.
00:50:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know you know the you guess were the Donner Party, Yes, right, these many years later, these researchers went into the trap the midden sites were the Donner Party were eating their dogs and some things they killed and their livestock, right, and they were wondering where are the human bones because we know that members of the Donner Party were practicing cannibalism. But they don’t find the human bones. So then people pointed out, well, they must not have done it. The question is perhaps they regarded those remains differently, meaning you were forced to commit cannibalism, you were forced to eat your relatives. But that doesn’t mean that you flick the bones out with the dog bones, right. They might have had a separate way, out of respect or whatever, that they would have entombed those remains or burned them up in a fire or something that was more ceremonial, even though they ate them. Something was more ceremonial than throwing them in the garbage pile.
00:51:55
Speaker 3: Well, there’s also a huge difference in time skills. So you could go to the Donner Party, which was not that long ago. You know, you can go to that site and see where things are. But a lot of these Neanderthal cave sites, the bones all get washed down into a gully, so so we don’t know where they were originally. But the reason they’re preserved is that they’re washed into a like an easy to hard to get to place in the cave.
00:52:21
Speaker 1: Okay, I got you. What evidence do we have of how they dressed and did they And I remember seeing like this idea that they had jewelry, and I can’t remember the details. But someone throwing out the idea that maybe they were getting the idea of wearing jewelry from modern humans. Okay, yep, Like what were they wearing and were they like beautifying themselves?
00:52:51
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, So some of these things we can answer and some we cannot. I’ll start with the beautifying okay, and the skin. I mean, we do tattoos, we do coloring with red ochre or whatever.
00:53:05
Speaker 5: None of this will survive.
00:53:08
Speaker 4: So they could be having elaborate rituals of getting together and painting. And you know, my group does this, your group does that. We will have no idea about that.
00:53:20
Speaker 2: No, there would be no way to know if they were tattooing themselves.
00:53:24
Speaker 4: No, all we would have. All we do have sometimes is the pigments. And we know that sometimes they used pigments, not as much as we don’t find another speaker us for modern humans later, but we do know that they were aware of them. You know, there could be whole areas of stuff that they were doing that we just cannot having a handle on whether they use clothing. They did, because they wouldn’t have survived in ice age Europe without clothing. Now saying ice h Europe. It wasn’t always uniformly cold. Some periods were fairly warm, even as warm as today. But generally to survive, especially overnight, it would require some kind of clothing.
00:54:19
Speaker 1: Would it require tailored clothing or do you think they could have just draped themselves with skins?
00:54:24
Speaker 4: Tailor clothing definitely have been better. We don’t have any evidence of needles from Neanderitals. We do have we have them from modern humans very early on, but not from Neanderthals. But we do know that they could make string and maybe they could fashion something this way, so they the general thing is that they must have used, you know, they had some kind of clothing. How came back to the elaborate They were elaborate that can we can use for anything. How elaborated it was, whether it was you know, fashion enough to provide better protection from cold, we don’t quite know. Jewelry we have some evidence of using jewelry in going back to that crappin a side.
00:55:23
Speaker 5: They had talent, yes, the eagle talents that.
00:55:33
Speaker 4: Now now there is such a thing that they were fit together in a sort of necklace because they also have kind of wear on the sides from rubbing against each other.
00:55:46
Speaker 2: Talents.
00:55:48
Speaker 4: Again, it’s not all that common, but we know that they did and they did perforate shells. The thing that you mentioned about did they learn from modern human mm hm. There is this time frame in southwest France we have neanatals and modern humans at the same time, towards the end of the presence of the neanditals and the beginning of the of monern humans.
00:56:16
Speaker 5: In Europe.
00:56:17
Speaker 4: We have some sites where they overlap, but overlap in a prehistory in a palalythic sense, which means that one could be here, you know, adults could be here now and for you know, a few years in one side and then leave and then one hundred years later or fifty years later monern humans gap no actual direct interaction with them. And we’re talking earlier about genetics and interbreeding and so on and how things have changed. But when we were graduate students, the idea was that modern humans and nanatals were in that part of France at the same same time. They but they did not mix with each other because we did not the whole genetics things hadn’t come in here.
00:57:07
Speaker 2: Like, we didn’t know that they were hooking up.
00:57:10
Speaker 5: Absolutely not.
00:57:11
Speaker 4: They had a barrier. They did not want to do that. They were not doing that. Ever.
00:57:16
Speaker 5: Was somebody actually have somebody who wrote a book.
00:57:19
Speaker 4: It is kind of he writes more popular or more archeology for a bigger audience, and he wrote a little book, I think, or I can’t remember. He said no sex we are or ignations Orgnations is the culture name of the earliest modern humans in southwest France. We call the stone tools and stuff that they produced.
00:57:39
Speaker 2: Or saying there was it was a joke.
00:57:45
Speaker 4: It was a joke on other people saying no, they had no contact. I mean, strictly speaking, it was true. We had no evidence to show that they had contact, but we kind of everyone most people were saying they did not anyway, So the idea was there that so the ourignation site was modern human. We thought it was modern human. And the Chateau Peronian, which is the other culture, the other layers that we found that we thought they were Neanderthal.
00:58:16
Speaker 5: And there are.
00:58:18
Speaker 4: Tools in the Chattel Peronian and shells that looked that look like it looks similar to what modern humans were doing. And the idea was doing that was that the Neanderthals, oh maybe the Neanditals saw them and thought, oh this works, this works, well, this looks like it could be a good thing to make, and they kind of recreated the shape but with a different method of napping the stone. And the idea was also the shells. Maybe they just saw them from modern humans and then they found their own and started using that.
00:59:00
Speaker 1: Now, this that’s really interesting that it was that they knew the end the end, but weren’t but developed the different process to achieve that thing.
00:59:11
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, so you see something to say, oh I can make that, but you don’t actually make.
00:59:16
Speaker 5: It the same way as the person who made it.
00:59:18
Speaker 3: So this was so this was stone tools, but it was also a jewelry. So it’s like primitive Neanderthal jewelry, or that’s what they thought it was.
00:59:25
Speaker 5: Yes, so, but.
00:59:28
Speaker 4: Now the thing is more that the nanodals developed these things, could have developed these things on their own. But also we have evidence of modern humans in Europe earlier than just the forty thousand years small, very small, very localized. So personally, I would not be surprised if five years from now there is clear evidence that Neanderdals ditch shells and jewelry or and art on their own developed it on their own, and I would also not be surprised is actually we have more modern humans and maybe there was more interaction in exchange and learning from each other than we thought.
01:00:16
Speaker 1: Man, we’re never going to know enough to know enough. You’re never going to answer all it, like, you know, we’re never going to know was there ever? Whatever you know, was there? Like they ran in and in a modern human and Neanderthal had like a relationship and split off and oh, I’m sure a family, you know, and like in some cave or whatever, like what just never It’s just it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating the things we’ll never know about how they interacted.
01:00:48
Speaker 3: We again, we’ve been talking to all these geneticists and one of them said, I think we just have to accept that things were messy and that we’re not really going to know the full story.
01:00:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s a there’s a quote we use a fair bit on the show, and it was introduced by a guest, and it was the past is a strange country, right, and and here you get to it was a I don’t know it real strange. The past was a real strange. Yeah, the past, that’s right. The past is the foreign country. So because it’s just there’s no you can get a little bit like you can look at all the times when and and like when Europeans kind of in the thirteen hundreds, fourteen hundreds, fifteen hundreds, when when Europeans kind of broke out of the continent and we had transoceanic ships, right, and they started running into all these long lost relatives, right they reached South America, whatever, they reached the hier Arctic, and you have these interactions and the perception of the perception like people that did pair off, right, like like French that would come over and they would build a family with a Native American woman, How that was perceived, right, the cultural clash of it, the way their peers looked at it. Just that we’ll never know what the perception was. How how is it perceived socially that that humans and theanerthals are pairing up, you know what I mean? Like, we’ll just never understand it.
01:02:34
Speaker 3: Or would they have would they have noticed it at all? Or would it would have just felt like another case of oh, there’s some guys over there.
01:02:44
Speaker 2: Oh and yeah, yeah, that’s true too. Maybe there wasn’t this huge comprehension.
01:02:49
Speaker 1: That they were a different people with a different history.
01:02:51
Speaker 2: It was just they were a thing.
01:02:52
Speaker 1: They were Yeah, maybe just thinking that was mostly like me.
01:02:54
Speaker 6: Maybe it just happened.
01:02:56
Speaker 1: Well, I have considered that. I always like to think of it in terms of a really dramatic encounter.
01:03:02
Speaker 6: It’s in us in them thing.
01:03:03
Speaker 3: But to me, the perspective is that it was all us, Like, it wasn’t us Homo sapiens and them Neanderthals. It was part of a big breeding population and it wasn’t just those two.
01:03:16
Speaker 6: There was Denisovans.
01:03:18
Speaker 3: There’s there’s evidence of some very archaic perhaps Homo erectus ancestor with introgression into Denisovans.
01:03:29
Speaker 6: There’s talk of.
01:03:30
Speaker 3: Ghost ancestor is a term that geneticis used when they know that it’s old but they don’t know what it is. And there’s there’s there are cases in West Africa of really recent, like twenty thousand years introgression from something archaic that.
01:03:45
Speaker 2: We haven’t identified.
01:03:46
Speaker 3: We don’t know what it is, and there’s even one model that says, you know, two percent of our DNAs Neanderthal up to twenty percent could be a ghost ancestor, and by that it could be just there’s a lot of mixing in. I mean this, I keep hitting this mixing in is just something that is part of our past.
01:04:04
Speaker 1: And I know that you explained that you had these people. The Nanderthals are spread over this huge areas, so you can’t speak like what the the calendar looked like for Nanderthals in Siberia was different than what the annual calendar was for Neanderthals on the Mediterranean, Right, But what what was their diet? And do you see that their diet was different than modern humans? The was the component of their diet significantly different than what modern humans utilized when they arrived on the same.
01:04:42
Speaker 3: Landscape Neanderthal’s, like you said, they they kept surprising us the last ten twenty years. Oh they did this, they did this, It was all very modern. The one thing that they the one threshold that they haven’t fully crossed is fishing. That Homo sapiens had really sophisticated harpoon spears to fish for catfish far earlier than anyone expected than anyone realized. And wells Neanderthals did seasonal shell you know, seafood collecting molluscs, and maybe did some fishing. The level was completely different and I think that was a that was a major change in diet hooks.
01:05:34
Speaker 6: No, no, oh, I see.
01:05:36
Speaker 3: We went to see the earliest harpoon points, which are at the Smithsonian, and it’s it’s just mind blowing. These things are ninety thousand years old, and that they were that modern humans in Africa were spearing catfish.
01:05:51
Speaker 6: That that was really yeah.
01:05:53
Speaker 3: And if you think about it, like a catfish, a seventy pound catfish is going to feed a lot of people.
01:06:00
Speaker 1: Do you see in Neanderthal campsites or in caves, is there a lot of evidence that they were processing nuts and seeds or do they seem to be primarily carnivorous.
01:06:09
Speaker 4: When you excavate very carefully and with techniques that are available now, we’re not available even ten or twenty years back, you find the little seeds, you find the plant remains. You can go into the plaque of teeth. Oh really, and you know they you know, luckily for us, they didn’t have hygienists, so a lot of it is still left on their teeth, so you can remove that and you can find what they You can find even remains of.
01:06:44
Speaker 2: Seeds or cake do under their teeth.
01:06:47
Speaker 4: Yes, Kate on their teeth or you can see the scratches on their teeth.
01:06:50
Speaker 3: My favorite one was is evidence that they were eating camam mile. Yes like we so they might have been big game hunters, but they you know, they enjoyed their of herbal tea.
01:07:02
Speaker 4: Maybe it was for medicine. Is it a medicine. Maybe it was for flavoring. And it’s actually a few years back in a cave in Iraq, shinny dark, they found a sort of flat bread type of thing, flat bread, I don’t know.
01:07:26
Speaker 5: It was.
01:07:27
Speaker 4: It was basically lentils or a form of lentils in water, probably soaked in water, and that kind of mushed, pulverized and then mixed with nuts and then yeah, they did and they baked it and uh basically because the people who published it did studied this in this site and another site in Greece that also has a long sequence that same similar recipe. More or less, they modern humans made it also at the same site really again and again later. You know, if you look at the because these some caves, sequences that can go for tens of thousands of years, not uninterrupted, but you can find slices and time and you know, even so that the Neanderthal thing was seventy seventy thousand years old. Roughly there was a modern human stuff from thirty thousand years and for younger also that they made a similar because they had access to the same plants basically, so a similar kind of thing, processing lentils and and adding nuts, unding even grasses. I don’t even you know, I’m not very good with plants. I’m not one of these people who recognize plants where they see them. But they had like wild olives, which is my favorite.
01:08:53
Speaker 1: Wild grapes.
01:08:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, shark plates and stuff.
01:08:59
Speaker 4: I guess you know that little flood bread You could add a grilled means on top when it’s chased.
01:09:08
Speaker 1: Great, that’ll be the next article that Neanderthals invented.
01:09:13
Speaker 5: Pizza, No, my gyro, you know that pizza.
01:09:20
Speaker 4: But and in terms of will we ever find this, will we ever find that? We also ten or twenty years ago and never thought that we would find genetic material be able to say this person was related to this person. You know, this were mother and daughter. We never thought we would find a hybrid and be able to say that this girl was actually had a Neanderdal father and the Nissovan mother. We never thought we would find this stuff. We also never thought we would be able to find the degree of plant remains that we find now, or fish for example. Yes, fewer fish bones from Neanderthals sites, but to find the fishbone in an archaeological site, it takes a lot of work, and it takes a lot of re sieving very very carefully, which most people didn’t do. You know, people didn’t do this stuff routinely even twenty or thirty years ago. And if you go to these old sites in Europe, we know a lot about nanatals in Europe, and that’s great and we’re all interested in that because we know a lot. But also a lot of these old sites that our knowledge comes from are destroyed. They were completely excavated when they were excavated. Now we go very carefully, very slowly, we leave part of the site so that people who are called us to count twenty or thirty years later and say, oh, we can look at this question now. You know, you have questions like how did they interact, what did they want to do? We can look at this question now, at this side that we know has this potentially relevant evidence, and look at it in much more detail.
01:10:58
Speaker 5: With what we know now.
01:11:00
Speaker 4: Now, we intentionally leave a lot of the site untouched so people can come in the future and do it, and we can’t go back to crapping and see what they had because there’s nothing left to actually go and excavate in the site.
01:11:15
Speaker 1: Again, I’m imagining the end of Neanderthals historically, I pictured it not historically like it in my mind’s eye.
01:11:26
Speaker 2: I pictured the.
01:11:27
Speaker 1: End as being that there’s you know, one little family left in a cave somewhere hiding, you know, and the modern humans are you know, eventually stumble across them and kill them off, and they’re like, ha, we did it. You know, we rid We’ve read europe of the Scourge of the Neanderthal. You know, now it’s our time to take possession of the continent and shine. You know, there’s there’s that narrative, right, but there’s this other narrative that that it didn’t go that way. And you said it was this meta population of people, and there was far more modern humans on the landscape than there were Neanderthals on the landscape, and in certain circumstances they enter bred and then maybe without anyone noticing, one day, gradually, one day they’re just there, weren’t any or because they’d been absorbed into the population, you know, do you imagine it more like more like them dying out right, like so that the passenger pigeon, Like we know who the last passenger pigeon was.
01:12:46
Speaker 2: It was named Martha.
01:12:48
Speaker 1: It died in whatever, nineteen oh three in the Cincinnati Zoo or whatever the hell it was. Like do you imagine it like that or do you imagine it like a fading that wasn’t realized by anyone. I think that the Neanderthals didn’t even know that they were vanishing.
01:13:04
Speaker 6: I think it’s a fading.
01:13:05
Speaker 3: I mean, there’s there’s this they call it the Lepido child, this young boy skeleton in Portugal. It’s like twenty four to twenty five thousand years old. A Grivetian. We were talking about the Gravettians for these amazing people who came into Europe and much more advanced, and debate went on for years. There seemed to be some Neanderthal traits in him. He like some of his bones kind of looked a bit in Neanderthal And so like the old school, who thought at the time they were the new school was saying, no, that’s impossible. There were no hybrids. Modern humans, you know, had completely replaced the Neanderthals by then, So we’re talking about, you know, if the last identifiable Neanderthal bones are forty thousand years old, so we’re talking about fifteen thousand years later. There’s this skeleton that kind of looks like a hybrid. So I think it’s more like that fading out that, you know, the the kind of like at some point there were no no more pure bread Neanderthals. But in a way, there’s no such thing as a pure bread anything and human evolution because there was.
01:14:13
Speaker 6: There were mixing events happening all the time.
01:14:17
Speaker 3: But to me, it would have faded out that way of of the mixed populations looking less and less Neanderthal until you could no longer see it. You can’t see it in us, you can just get it from our DNA.
01:14:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, rather than you know, because if you’re going to make a movie about it, man, you’d make a movie where they knew they were at the end.
01:14:38
Speaker 2: Well, do you know they knew they were the last ones left?
01:14:41
Speaker 1: You know, But that’s putting like a level of drama on it that maybe wasn’t there.
01:14:46
Speaker 4: I don’t yeah. I think over the area of where the nanditals were, probably different scenarios played out. In some cases, you could have hads who disappeared from their lives or left the lane and never came back, even maybe even before more than humans show it up.
01:15:06
Speaker 1: I got last question for you. What would you each ask this to each of you? What is the thing you wish you knew the most about Neanderthals, Like like if you could have a question answered, what would it be.
01:15:24
Speaker 4: You know the most now or new?
01:15:26
Speaker 5: Like like sometimes in the past.
01:15:27
Speaker 1: Like what is it?
01:15:28
Speaker 2: What is the burning question?
01:15:29
Speaker 1: And even if it’s something that you know, you’ll never answer, like like what is a sort of easily understood question that you have?
01:15:38
Speaker 6: M I mean I would.
01:15:42
Speaker 3: I want to get back to your question of was their language as complex as ours? I would I would want to know if they understood nuance, if they if they could laugh at a subtle joke mhm. To me, that’s that’s a big part of humanity. And they had so much, but they didn’t have everything that Homo sapiens had, And that to me is like would they laugh if I said some stupid would they get dad jokes?
01:16:09
Speaker 2: Yeah? Would they ever roll their eyes at someone like, oh that guy.
01:16:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think they would roll their eyes at someone, but like subtle jokes. Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. That’s a good question.
01:16:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess I put it also in the how their minds worked. I would in the same area how their minds worked, but maybe how how they planned forward, how much how much they were able to say, I’m going to pick up the stone and do this and then do that, and kind of how much they how much more were planning they had.
01:16:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, if they thought like I would like to make acts in the future, but first I’ll need to go do this and this and this in order to get ready for that down the road.
01:17:05
Speaker 4: Yeah, or if I sit all this, if if me and my mate sit on the you know, outside this cave and we watch the animals over there migrate, would they be able how much would they be able to see? Okay, so if I stay here in the spring and they migrate south, and if I bring they do this and then do that, and if we kind of move them direct them this way, me and my friends can trap them over there. Because how much knowledge they had of the world around them and how much they could plan ahead and coordinate with others and.
01:17:47
Speaker 5: What to do.
01:17:51
Speaker 1: My question is not really a question, but like I you know, I married a modern human just because there’s no options. But I do wonder had I encountered that Neanderthal woman with the eagle claw necklace?
01:18:07
Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean, what I’ve been into her?
01:18:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, what I’ve been strict at, what I’ve fallen in love, you know, with that necklace.
01:18:14
Speaker 2: You know, that’s a question.
01:18:15
Speaker 1: And the other one is, like I was brought up earlier, is just again it just it burns in my head, is like what was the comprehension level of could they comprehended themselves as a thing? And if they could, could they comprehend of it as being a thing that was coming to an end? And you’re like, just probably not, Yeah, probably not because without written record, you know, they wouldn’t have a notion of what the total what their total population size was at some point and that they’re now less and that they’re losing ground, or you know, like any sort of notion of history.
01:18:59
Speaker 3: I think it’s only really recently that we modern humans think of ourselves as one thing. I mean, when when just the term homo sapien was developed. There were five subcategories. And you mentioned when in about the discovery, you know, when Europeans discovered the Americas and there are people there, there was a debate are these from the same creation? Sure, so the the notion that we are we Homo sapiens on Earth today are one’s it’s a new idea. And so if Neanderthals are thinking, you know, they’re you know, we’re talking about group size. You know, they probably had there one hundred and thirty and that was that’s probably that was their world.
01:19:48
Speaker 6: Those are my people. They didn’t think beyond that.
01:19:51
Speaker 3: And then if they encountered other Neanderthals, they probably thought that’s something different.
01:19:56
Speaker 2: But you imagine, like take like.
01:20:02
Speaker 1: Bison. Okay, we we we have very few of them, very few of them left relative to how many there were. Right those individual animals, as far as we know, those individual animals carry with them no recognition of what they once were or what happened to them, or no idea that there’s something less than that their empire collapsed, do you know, I mean they’re like, we know it, but as far as we know the way we can comprehend it, they have no idea.
01:20:41
Speaker 2: Of what their history is.
01:20:44
Speaker 1: They’re just right, They’re aware of the ones around them, but they would have no way, they would never have a way of conveying.
01:20:50
Speaker 2: Like we used to dominate this landscape, you know.
01:20:55
Speaker 5: But even.
01:20:58
Speaker 4: That idea that we have is pretty recent. If you were even a farmer in medieval Europe, did you even know what Europe is? Yeah, that’s true, I mean you had, but still people had, you know, stories, they had religion, they had traditions, they had stuff that was passed down from generation to generations, so they had some notion of where they came from, what their group was. Without having this, you know, they had never seen a.
01:21:29
Speaker 5: Map of Europe.
01:21:31
Speaker 4: Equally, Homo sapiens in thirty thousand year old Europe had never seen a map of human had no idea how my ancestors came from Africa and we you know, we have taken over the world and now we’re going to take over Europe. Also, there was there wasn’t such a thing or you could, but they probably and even the Neandols probably did have the notion of their group was coming to an end there and maybe their parents and grandparents, you know, as far back they would go. I mean, we don’t know, but probably when they sat and the campfire or whatever equivalent they had, they did tell some stories. They did transfer to their kids the way of doing things. You know, you work the stone this way, you cut the cut of the animal this way, and you prepare cook the food this way. All this was stuff presumably was passed down from generation to generation, and along that some idea of you know, where they that they had ancestors, that they were a group, but how farther geographically or chronologically a notion they had It was certainly nothing similar to us now. But also most of our ancestors did not have that perception of a war world that went so far beyond them. Most of our awer often quite a lot of our ancestors did not move very far from where they were born.
01:23:10
Speaker 2: Do you guys think you’ll.
01:23:12
Speaker 1: Do? You do you envision a fourth edition of your book as new stuff comes out?
01:23:19
Speaker 4: I was actually thinking when you started that the the you know, the different editions to update it. Our book started because the previous book from the same publisher was completely out of date. And I was at that point teaching and teaching continue education class for adults, and I said, at some point in Mike, I don’t know what to tell these people to read, because they can’t just go to the library and read all the articles with all the new stuff. And there is no easy way, you know, no book to give to them. And he goes, well, why don’t we write that?
01:24:01
Speaker 5: And the person who wrote.
01:24:03
Speaker 4: The previous book or one of the tools of previous was my postoc mentor. And I think at some point I said to him, would you want to do that? He goes, oh, my god, no, that would be writing the book from the from scratch. There’s no there’s no rewriting that book because it’s too far out of date. I suspect that.
01:24:29
Speaker 6: I think we’re there. I think I.
01:24:31
Speaker 4: Suspect that if we read do it, it will take a lot of work.
01:24:34
Speaker 1: It needs to be at some point, it needs to be like a demolish and rebuild.
01:24:38
Speaker 3: Well, the category is like, if you were reading a Neanderthal book, you would want all the questions you asked, where’s the section on ornament and clothing, where’s the section on Neanderthal diet? Ten years ago, there wasn’t enough to fill a section of either of those things. Where’s a section on Neanderthal cave art? That didn’t even exist, so now there are all these news and so we would just we would organize it differently.
01:25:04
Speaker 6: If we had to do it today.
01:25:05
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, if you want to find out what.
01:25:10
Speaker 1: If you want to find out what’s known now, okay, the current landscape, check out the Neanderthals Rediscovered how modern science is rewriting their story.
01:25:20
Speaker 2: Make sure you get the third edition, right, yeah, don’t get.
01:25:24
Speaker 1: The first to get the third edition authors Dimitra, I’m gonna do the phonetic Papa Gianni, Papa Gianni, just so you know when you’re reading it it’s pronounced. I was laughing earlier because yahness, my beloved colleague, his father, we call Papayani.
01:25:44
Speaker 2: And say your last name Papa Yanni.
01:25:47
Speaker 1: So Dimitri Papa Gianni or Papayanni and Mike morrise. And then if you want, you know, as things change and update, look to these look to these authors to keep you up. Be thank you for joining.
01:26:01
Speaker 6: Thank you so much, this has been fun.
01:26:03
Speaker 1: Appreciate
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