Ep. 896: Who Were the Neanderthals?

Steven Rinella talks with authors Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse.

Topics discussed: What we mean when we say “neanderthal,” taal v. thaal; 23andMe; human and neanderthal interactions; how language may have operated; cannibalism through the ages; neanderthal fashion; the limits of site excavation; and more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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(00:29):
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.

(00:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
And here you are these Okay, they have a book.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
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.

(01:27):
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,

(01:52):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
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

(02:30):
like cartoons and things. You just picture people with big
clubs and they're hitting each other with clubs and dragging.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Their knuckles along the ground.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
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,

(02:57):
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

(03:19):
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?

Speaker 2 (03:31):
What happened to them?

Speaker 1 (03:32):
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?

(03:53):
What does that mean?

Speaker 4 (03:55):
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.

(04:18):
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

(04:39):
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

(05:01):
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.

Speaker 5 (05:11):
And they.

Speaker 4 (05:14):
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

(05:37):
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

(06:00):
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.

Speaker 5 (06:14):
More bird like profile.

Speaker 4 (06:18):
They didn't have chins. No, we don't even know why
we have chins.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
It's not clear why.

Speaker 5 (06:25):
We don't know.

Speaker 4 (06:25):
There are many theories of why we have chins and
what they do. But they did not have chins.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
That yeah, uh, anotho could kick a normal person like
a nanothal could beat up.

Speaker 4 (06:37):
Yeah, probably an animal woman could beat up a modern
human man.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Just across the board like big strong.

Speaker 4 (06:44):
No not probably not across the board, depending on their lifestyle.

Speaker 6 (06:49):
But they were very muscular, very strong bones.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
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?

Speaker 3 (07:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Please, because there's a valley in Germany and exactly they
call that the Neanderthal Valley or something.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
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

(07:52):
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

(08:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
Oh really, okay, so we say.

Speaker 3 (08:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
One.

Speaker 3 (08:44):
The parint is once you start saying it one way,
it's very hard to change.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Once we were talking change two times.

Speaker 6 (08:49):
Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Got it.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Good to get that cleared up.

Speaker 6 (09:09):
Yeah, we're fine.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
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

(09:33):
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

(09:54):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
What are we saying?

Speaker 4 (10:08):
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.

Speaker 5 (10:28):
You know, I'm like thirty percent Italian.

Speaker 4 (10:30):
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

(10:54):
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

(11:17):
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.

(11:40):
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

(12:03):
they had none. They had a tiny bit because at
some point there was migration back to Africa and intermixing.

Speaker 5 (12:10):
But it's different.

Speaker 4 (12:11):
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

(12:34):
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

(12:57):
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

(13:18):
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

(13:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:54):
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

(14:16):
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.

Speaker 7 (14:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
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

(15:12):
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

(15:37):
some area because those people that became those people had
just a different experience.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
I think that does that Does that make any sense
at all?

Speaker 3 (15:48):
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

(16:13):
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

(16:35):
of the same breeding population, then that ten percent kind
of spreads around to everyone, and then it's been slowly
getting whittled down.

Speaker 6 (16:44):
It's like it's being selected outood.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
So I mean another geneticists used the term toxic, that
Neanderthal DNA is toxic.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
It it that's a brand. That's a branding problem.

Speaker 6 (17:00):
You know, as life goes on, we have less and
less of it?

Speaker 1 (17:05):
Got it? Got it?

Speaker 2 (17:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
Know, But how do how do we imagine it was?

Speaker 2 (17:16):
The interaction?

Speaker 1 (17:20):
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.

(17:42):
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.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
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.

(18:17):
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

(18:39):
basically how sexes are represented in the DNA, not.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
Necessarily primarily male neanderthals breeding with female No.

Speaker 5 (18:47):
No, no no.

Speaker 4 (18:49):
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

(19:10):
because it was not you know what you called toxic
got it.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
So it's not conclusive to me.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
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

(19:40):
maybe it just shouldn't have been maybe you know, there's
just mixing.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Do you they had a language? You think they were talking?

Speaker 6 (20:02):
Absolutely?

Speaker 2 (20:03):
How complex?

Speaker 3 (20:06):
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

(20:28):
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

(20:49):
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

(21:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yeah, so the word complex language doesn't that doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Well how do we know they how do you know
they had language?

Speaker 1 (21:50):
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?

Speaker 3 (21:57):
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.

Speaker 6 (22:17):
Let me just rewind.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
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

(22:40):
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

(23:04):
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?

Speaker 6 (23:15):
They do grooming.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Got it.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
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.

(23:59):
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

(24:21):
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

(24:41):
is this guy? You know, like coming up to me
like this, So we obviously live in.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Yeah, that's interesting that the size of the group. It does.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
The size of the group.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Informs or dictates what would be an appropriate way to
approach somebody.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
People that you can maintain daily contact with, and that's
fairly small because you have to.

Speaker 5 (25:05):
You have to.

Speaker 4 (25:06):
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

(25:27):
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

(25:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
A card, yes, your wedding if you have a good budget, So.

Speaker 4 (26:08):
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

(26:28):
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

(26:51):
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.

(27:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
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,

(28:06):
would it have been incomprehensible to Homo sapiens?

Speaker 2 (28:10):
I mean, like, was the right amount of.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
Time gone by that they would have developed these entirely
different languages?

Speaker 2 (28:16):
And by that, I mean if you look.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
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

(28:39):
re meet, the languages are incomprehensible, The cultures are largely incompatible.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
They look totally different.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
They weren't yelling hello.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Across the valley.

Speaker 4 (29:11):
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

(29:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
So different Neanderthal communities might have had totally different words.

Speaker 4 (29:56):
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.

Speaker 5 (30:19):
They're not the same.

Speaker 4 (30:20):
I mean, it takes.

Speaker 5 (30:21):
It takes.

Speaker 4 (30:24):
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,

(30:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
That's a good poets. I had a linguist explain that.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
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

(31:29):
not be able to communicate.

Speaker 4 (31:31):
Yeah, it doesn't take a load of time.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
All the words would have gone different.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
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?

(31:57):
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.

Speaker 6 (32:08):
You know, you can learn each other's languages.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
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

(32:32):
of doing this all the time.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
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.

Speaker 5 (32:43):
What we do have.

Speaker 4 (32:44):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
Really, Yeah, that's yeah, there's squeaky there's big guys with
squeaky little voice.

Speaker 5 (33:03):
Yeah, because of how.

Speaker 6 (33:06):
That's squeaky little voice, that's that's the theory.

Speaker 5 (33:09):
That's the theory. Yes.

Speaker 4 (33:11):
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

(33:31):
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

(33:55):
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,

(34:16):
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.

Speaker 5 (34:27):
What do they do?

Speaker 4 (34:28):
We don't know what they did. What were they were
they sign that you know we are here mhm?

Speaker 5 (34:36):
Or maybe even with art on rock art? Is that
a sign that this is our group?

Speaker 4 (34:48):
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

(35:10):
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?

Speaker 5 (35:18):
How do you tell them?

Speaker 4 (35:19):
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

(35:40):
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

(36:03):
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

(36:23):
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,

(36:45):
abstract of relating with people you don't see maybe every day.
That's where modern humans probably had an advantage.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
Is there evidence that they ate each other? Yes, humans
know that humans and Neanderthals were eating each other.

Speaker 6 (37:04):
With each other.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
There probably there's lots of evidence that that Homo sapiens
were eating Homo sapiens and that Neanderthals reading Neanderthals.

Speaker 6 (37:12):
But I don't know if.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
There's evidence that Homo sapians are eating Homo sapiens.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
It's it's incredibly well documented in almost every period of
our past that cannibalism happened.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
But there's not physical evidence of a Neanderthal camp site
and among their artifacts are butchered Homo sapien remains.

Speaker 3 (37:37):
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.

Speaker 6 (37:58):
There was actually there was.

Speaker 3 (37:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Butchered eating by who.

Speaker 6 (38:16):
Well you know, they didn't leave their calling card, so
we don't.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
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.

Speaker 4 (38:33):
Yeah, it could be, yes, but there is no indication
that there were any modern humans nearby.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
But so it could have been by other Neanderthals.

Speaker 5 (38:42):
Yes, So.

Speaker 4 (38:45):
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.

Speaker 5 (39:01):
You kind of.

Speaker 4 (39:05):
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

(39:25):
a violent context in modern humans.

Speaker 5 (39:31):
For Neanderthals.

Speaker 4 (39:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
It has butcher marks on.

Speaker 6 (40:09):
It has marks, and.

Speaker 4 (40:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
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

(40:51):
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.

(41:13):
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.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
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,

(41:47):
so like twenty thirty thousand years what really?

Speaker 4 (41:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (41:52):
Yeah, So you don't think there were wars between Neanderthals
and modern humans.

Speaker 3 (41:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
Like we make a big old plan and it's got
step one, step two, step three.

Speaker 3 (42:17):
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

(42:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
So you think it was it was that cannibalism in
the Aztec was driven by like literally a need for food.

Speaker 3 (42:59):
This is now I was I was a graduate student
in anthropology, and this is a very unpopular view in
anthropology departments.

Speaker 1 (43:07):
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.

Speaker 4 (43:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:30):
I want to I want to clarify I don't hold
that opinion I mean.

Speaker 1 (43:34):
I don't practice. I don't.

Speaker 6 (43:35):
I don't know practice.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:42):
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

(44:03):
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.

Speaker 6 (44:19):
You know, as part of a as part of a
battle against some group.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
I mean, so like this the site in Belgium I
mentioned is like a Neanderthal family.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
We don't know that there were the dynamics of the family.

Speaker 6 (44:32):
I think it was the.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
It was I think it was the men were closely
related and the women had come in from somewhere else.

Speaker 6 (44:41):
But even that, we don't group.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
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.

(45:10):
Maybe they maybe it was done one or two at
a time and they just happened to Washington.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
How heavy was a Neanderthal if you had to.

Speaker 6 (45:20):
Guess, let's say one hundred and fifty pounds.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
I bet.

Speaker 1 (45:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
But that's really interesting idea to think about it, they'd
be like, that's a lot of meat.

Speaker 4 (46:08):
The type of studies that it would be very Neanderthals
wouldn't be, or humans are not.

Speaker 5 (46:13):
Generally very nutritious to eat.

Speaker 4 (46:16):
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,

(46:39):
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,

(47:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (47:21):
Yeah, maybe they only brought the butchered people into the cave.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
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

(47:52):
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?

Speaker 4 (48:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:19):
It has like thirty at least, I mean the numbers
go back and forth, but probably thirty individual Neanderthals, a
lot of whom were.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Butchered in a Neanderthal camp well.

Speaker 6 (48:28):
In a cave site in a case.

Speaker 4 (48:29):
But I said, who knows, because it was excavated and
almost completely excavated. The whole thing was dug out, excavated.

Speaker 6 (48:37):
And in like one hundred and twenty eight.

Speaker 4 (48:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
There was by what they look at what they were
looking for.

Speaker 4 (49:02):
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

(49:23):
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

(49:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Everything is kind of ground in together.

Speaker 4 (49:59):
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.

Speaker 5 (50:18):
We just know that they were. They ate those.

Speaker 3 (50:23):
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.

Speaker 4 (50:37):
Yeah, in a sense, they were not treated us more special.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
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

(51:03):
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

(51:24):
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

(51:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
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

(52:20):
to place in the cave.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
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

(52:44):
modern humans. Okay, yep, Like what were they wearing and
were they like beautifying themselves?

Speaker 4 (52:51):
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.

Speaker 5 (53:05):
None of this will survive.

Speaker 4 (53:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
No, there would be no way to know if they
were tattooing themselves.

Speaker 4 (53:24):
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

(53:47):
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.

(54:07):
Some periods were fairly warm, even as warm as today.
But generally to survive, especially overnight, it would require some
kind of clothing.

Speaker 1 (54:19):
Would it require tailored clothing or do you think they
could have just draped themselves with skins?

Speaker 4 (54:24):
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,

(54:47):
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

(55:18):
in going back to that crappin a side.

Speaker 5 (55:23):
They had talent, yes, the eagle talents that.

Speaker 4 (55:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
Talents.

Speaker 4 (55:48):
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

(56:09):
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.

Speaker 5 (56:16):
In Europe.

Speaker 4 (56:17):
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

(56:37):
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

(56:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
Like, we didn't know that they were hooking up.

Speaker 5 (57:10):
Absolutely not.

Speaker 4 (57:11):
They had a barrier. They did not want to do that.
They were not doing that. Ever.

Speaker 5 (57:16):
Was somebody actually have somebody who wrote a book.

Speaker 4 (57:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
Or saying there was it was a joke.

Speaker 4 (57:45):
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

(58:08):
modern human. And the Chateau Peronian, which is the other culture,
the other layers that we found that we thought they
were Neanderthal.

Speaker 5 (58:16):
And there are.

Speaker 4 (58:18):
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

(58:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
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.

Speaker 4 (59:11):
Yeah. Yeah, so you see something to say, oh I
can make that, but you don't actually make.

Speaker 5 (59:16):
It the same way as the person who made it.

Speaker 3 (59:18):
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.

Speaker 5 (59:25):
Yes, so, but.

Speaker 4 (59:28):
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

(59:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
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

(01:00:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:00:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
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.

(01:01:21):
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

(01:01:41):
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

(01:02:06):
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.

(01:02:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:02:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Oh and yeah, yeah, that's true too. Maybe there wasn't
this huge comprehension.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
That they were a different people with a different history.

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
It was just they were a thing.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
They were Yeah, maybe just thinking that was mostly like me.

Speaker 6 (01:02:54):
Maybe it just happened.

Speaker 1 (01:02:56):
Well, I have considered that. I always like to think
of it in terms of a really dramatic encounter.

Speaker 6 (01:03:02):
It's in us in them thing.

Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
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.

Speaker 6 (01:03:16):
There was Denisovans.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
There's there's evidence of some very archaic perhaps Homo erectus
ancestor with introgression into Denisovans.

Speaker 6 (01:03:29):
There's talk of.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
We haven't identified.

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
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

(01:04:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:04:42):
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

(01:05:04):
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

(01:05:27):
was completely different and I think that was a that
was a major change in diet hooks.

Speaker 6 (01:05:34):
No, no, oh, I see.

Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
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.

Speaker 6 (01:05:51):
That that was really yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
And if you think about it, like a catfish, a
seventy pound catfish is going to feed a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:06:09):
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,

(01:06:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
Seeds or cake do under their teeth.

Speaker 4 (01:06:47):
Yes, Kate on their teeth or you can see the
scratches on their teeth.

Speaker 3 (01:06:50):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:07:02):
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,

(01:07:23):
I don't know.

Speaker 5 (01:07:26):
It was.

Speaker 4 (01:07:27):
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

(01:07:49):
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

(01:08:11):
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

(01:08:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
Wild grapes.

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
Yeah, well, shark plates and stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:08:59):
I guess you know that little flood bread You could
add a grilled means on top when it's chased.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Great, that'll be the next article that Neanderthals invented.

Speaker 5 (01:09:13):
Pizza, No, my gyro, you know that pizza.

Speaker 4 (01:09:20):
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

(01:09:40):
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

(01:10:02):
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

(01:10:24):
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

(01:10:44):
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.

Speaker 5 (01:10:58):
With what we know now.

Speaker 4 (01:11:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
Again, I'm imagining the end of Neanderthals historically, I pictured
it not historically like it in my mind's eye.

Speaker 2 (01:11:26):
I pictured the.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
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

(01:11:51):
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

(01:12:14):
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

(01:12:38):
more like more like them dying out right, like so
that the passenger pigeon, Like we know who the last
passenger pigeon was.

Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
It was named Martha.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
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.

Speaker 6 (01:13:04):
I think it's a fading.

Speaker 3 (01:13:05):
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

(01:13:26):
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

(01:13:49):
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

(01:14:11):
anything and human evolution because there was.

Speaker 6 (01:14:13):
There were mixing events happening all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:14:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:14:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14:38):
Well, do you know they knew they were the last
ones left?

Speaker 1 (01:14:41):
You know, But that's putting like a level of drama
on it that maybe wasn't there.

Speaker 4 (01:14:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:15:06):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:15:24):
You know the most now or new?

Speaker 5 (01:15:26):
Like like sometimes in the past.

Speaker 1 (01:15:27):
Like what is it?

Speaker 2 (01:15:28):
What is the burning question?

Speaker 1 (01:15:29):
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?

Speaker 6 (01:15:38):
M I mean I would.

Speaker 3 (01:15:42):
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,

(01:16:03):
And that to me is like would they laugh if
I said some stupid would they get dad jokes?

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
Yeah? Would they ever roll their eyes at someone like,
oh that guy.

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:16:24):
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

(01:16:46):
then do that, and kind of how much they how
much more were planning they had.

Speaker 1 (01:16:52):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:17:05):
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

(01:17:29):
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.

Speaker 5 (01:17:47):
What to do.

Speaker 1 (01:17:51):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:18:07):
Do you know what I mean, what I've been into her?

Speaker 1 (01:18:10):
Yeah, what I've been strict at, what I've fallen in love,
you know, with that necklace.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
You know, that's a question.

Speaker 1 (01:18:15):
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

(01:18:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:18:59):
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,

(01:19:22):
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

(01:19:44):
there one hundred and thirty and that was that's probably
that was their world.

Speaker 6 (01:19:48):
Those are my people. They didn't think beyond that.

Speaker 3 (01:19:51):
And then if they encountered other Neanderthals, they probably thought
that's something different.

Speaker 2 (01:19:56):
But you imagine, like take like.

Speaker 1 (01:20:02):
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

(01:20:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:20:41):
Of what their history is.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:20:50):
Like we used to dominate this landscape, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:20:55):
But even.

Speaker 4 (01:20:58):
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

(01:21:20):
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.

Speaker 5 (01:21:29):
Map of Europe.

Speaker 4 (01:21:31):
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

(01:21:55):
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.

(01:22:16):
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,

(01:22:39):
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

(01:23:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:23:10):
Do you guys think you'll.

Speaker 1 (01:23:12):
Do? You do you envision a fourth edition of your
book as new stuff comes out?

Speaker 4 (01:23:19):
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,

(01:23:42):
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?

Speaker 5 (01:24:01):
And the person who wrote.

Speaker 4 (01:24:03):
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.

(01:24:26):
I suspect that.

Speaker 6 (01:24:29):
I think we're there. I think I.

Speaker 4 (01:24:31):
Suspect that if we read do it, it will take
a lot of work.

Speaker 1 (01:24:34):
It needs to be at some point, it needs to
be like a demolish and rebuild.

Speaker 3 (01:24:38):
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

(01:24:59):
now there are all these news and so we would
just we would organize it differently.

Speaker 6 (01:25:04):
If we had to do it today.

Speaker 2 (01:25:05):
So yeah, well, if you want to find out what.

Speaker 1 (01:25:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:25:20):
Make sure you get the third edition, right, yeah, don't get.

Speaker 1 (01:25:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:25:44):
And say your last name Papa Yanni.

Speaker 1 (01:25:47):
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.

Speaker 6 (01:26:01):
Thank you so much, this has been fun.

Speaker 1 (01:26:03):
Appreciate