February 21, 2019 • 41 mins
Mo welcomes his friend Michael Ian Black – comedian, author, podcaster, and, as it turns out, Neanderthal (we’ll explain). Mo talks to Michael and the world’s leading researchers about why our extinct human cousins Neanderthals have gotten such a bad rap for so many many years, and how we’re learning more about how close we really were. Oh, Mo also talks to the guy who played Cha-ka on the 70s kids show Land of the Lost.Learn more about the Mobituaries book: http://bit.ly/MobituariesBook
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
During the earliest days of this millennium, I took part
in a kind of history series, an ambitious survey that
explored milestones in American culture decade by decade. Of course
I'm talking about and after. I loved the apies there was,
(00:29):
and really who could forget What made Dynasty work was
the camp fights. Yeah, he went from John Cougar to
John Cougar Mellencamp and I thought, did he get married?
John Travolta's asked Urban Cowboy is if there should be
(00:49):
a shrine Delta. It was a classy show featuring a
panoply of commentators, and I was one of them, pondering
complex topics like nineteen eighties hospital dramas, saying elsewhere it
was and our long drama. It starred Mark Harman as
doctor Bobby Caldwell. Comedian and actor Michael Ian Black was
(01:11):
another contributor. I thought, if anything, the title That's Incredible,
it was an understatement of how incredible the things on
That's incredible work. We didn't really know each other back then,
but I distinctly remember his take on the nineteen eighty
one Neanderthal epic Quest for Fire. While most of us
were obsessed with the film's nudity, Michael took the high road.
(01:33):
I was really looking at it more from an anthropological
point of view than to see ray Don Jones tatas.
And it's that prehistory that's our subject this episode. Since
Quest for Fire, we've learned some stunning truths about Neanderthals,
and I knew who. I wanted to discuss this topic
(01:53):
with my friend Michael ian Black back when we were
loving the eighties. Neither of us knew just how connected
he is to our human cousins of four thousand decades ago.
If they had told me only how much Neanderthal I am,
I would have paid twice the amount for the test.
I'm mo Rocca. And this is mobituaries. This mobit Neanderthals
(02:24):
circa forty thousand years ago, death of a human species. Okay, first,
let's take care of some basics. The name Neanderthal comes
from the neander Valley in Germany, where one of the
first Neanderthal skulls was found in eighteen fifty six. At
the time, the fossil was misidentified as the skull of
(02:47):
a Cossack soldier from the Napoleonic Wars. They were only
off by a few tens of thousands of years now,
Neanderthals were also human, but a separate species Homo sapiens.
That's us and Neanderthals did share a common ancestor over
half a million years ago. Almo sapiens would go on
to flourish in Africa, while Neanderthals roamed across Europe and Asia,
(03:11):
adapting to a cold or harsher climate. Eventually the two
species did meet up. Then, about thirty to forty thousand
years ago, Neanderthals disappeared without a trace, or so we thought,
which brings me to my guest, Michael ian Black. So,
Michael Ian Black, thank you so much for joining me
(03:32):
for this whole episode. My pleasure. Let's get the promotion
out of the way first, because it's deserved. Your podcast,
How to Be Amazing is amazing. Yes, you can be
on it. No, yes, I think that's where I was going.
So years ago I interviewed you about your one of
your books, Naval Gazing, and in it you talked about
(03:53):
genetic testing and why did you go about investigating your
genetic makeup? I think the same reason most people do,
just curiosity. I just wanted to know genetically speaking, who
I am. I had it in my head that I
must be at least a pastiche of things, some kind
(04:15):
of milange. I was hoping to find some African Americans,
some Native American but the results were so disappointingly kind
of exactly what I had been led to believe, which
is that I am a hundred percent Ashkenazi Jew. I
do think the food is better than Sephardic food. Delicious,
(04:36):
delicious if you just take the gafiltha fish out of
that which I have always associated and will always associate
with just jellied cat turns. But but you say you
found out you were one hundred percent Ashkenazic Jew. But
that's not quite right. Well, it is in terms of ethicity.
(04:58):
But there was also a marker which I didn't know
till I got it back from the company that says
it will also tell you your Neanderthal percentages. If they
had told me only how much Neanderthal I am, I
would have paid twice the amount for the test, because
for some reason, that just really captured my imagination to think, oh,
(05:20):
I may be part of an entirely different species. Right.
That was thrilling to me, And I didn't know that
they had developed the test, and I found out that
I am two point nine percent Neanderthal, which is greater
than the norm. The average is a two point seven percent. Okay,
(05:41):
that's a significant difference. I mean, I can't tell you
how delighted I was to hear this, because your listeners
can't see me, but you can probably tell by the
way I speak in the timber of my voice that
I am not the most masculine of fellows. But I
was going to say, I mean, I mean, I'm tolerant,
(06:03):
but to a point. But just the popular image of
the Neanderthal as a lumbering brute, as this strong survivor
out on the steps end planes just thrilled me to
no end. And so I was delighted. And I told
my wife that I am above averagely Neanderthal, and she said,
(06:25):
that's why you look like that, and she did not
mean it as a compliment. And let me just say
that Martha is highly evolved. She's basically Darryl Hannah and
Clanta the Cave Bear, a highly evolved, leggy blonde. Yes
she is, but wait, wait, hold on, When you describe
Neanderthals as masculine, lumbering brutes. You're making certain assumptions, and
(06:47):
we'll dispel some of these in this episode. For instance,
how do we know there weren't cultured, epicy Neanderthals? Well,
I think we do know now you are doing the research.
And I'm just speaking off the top of my head.
Now they were conness of fine wine, is my understanding.
They did puppet shows. Oh, Michael, We've got some work
to do. Think of me as your Henry Lewis Skates
(07:08):
and this is finding your roots, or as your Lisa
Kudrow and this is who do you think you are?
I think that's her show. I want you to know
that your Neanderthal ancestors were pretty darned special and not
as different from us normal people as you may think.
So how did they get such a bad rap? Let's
find out. I grew up with so many classic TV
(07:36):
shows and films about Neanderthals and cavemen, and they pretty
much all got it wrong. In nineteen eighty one, there
was the aforementioned Quest for Fire. The characters basically just
plump through the whole movie, except when one of them
gets beamed in the head by a rock and then
(07:57):
everyone laughs. That same year, moviegoers were subjected to the
ringo star vehicle Caveman. During the course of the movie,
a bunch of bumbling cavemen discover fire, how to light
farts on fire, and jam bands and who could forget
(08:25):
the mel Blanc voiced cartoon character. But as far as
portrayals of the primordial go the show that had the
biggest impact on me was Land of the Lost. The
theme song told the story of the series. It's about
(08:46):
a family on a river rafting trip. During the ride,
they go down a magical waterfall and enter a universe
filled with dinosaurs and cave creatures. Hi, I'm Phil Paley
and I played Chocca on the seventies show Land of
(09:09):
the Lost. You were only nine years old when he
got this role. Tell us about the character. Chaca was
the youngest of the pacoony clan. What do you think
he is? Who kind of a came in a monkey
or what? Chaca? I wore a prosthetic headpiece, so it
(09:30):
had a very prominent brow and forehead, so it did
kind of look neanderthal ish. I guess back when I
watched the show, I kind of assumed Chocca was a Neanderthal.
But looking back at the clips. Now he seems more
monkey boy free all over, except for his face. The
suit was made out of like nylon pantyhose material with
(09:51):
a real human hair hand sewn into it, so it
made it kind of itchy. Luckily, there are some people
who know the difference between Saturday Morning science fiction and
real science. Anything that depicts Neanderthals as basically bad hair,
that's what I laugh about. Professor John Hawks from the
University of Wisconsin at o'claire is one of the world's
(10:13):
leading experts on Neanderthals. Why have Neanderthals had such a
bad reputation. The Neanderthals are a group that doesn't have
an advocacy. They don't have a lobby. You know, there's
there's not Neanderthal representatives calling their congressman and so as
a consequence, if you thought something bad about the past,
(10:37):
you know, they were a convenient group because they weren't
going to complain. It's so easy to use Geico dot com.
A caveman could do it. What not cool? I did
not know you were there. The Neanderthals in those Geico
commercials might be funny, but make no mistake, we're laughing
at them. So how did this stereotyping of Meanderthals as brutish,
(11:01):
howling and stupid get started? John Hawkes says it may
have begun with a nineteenth century German biologist named Ernst Heckel,
who attempted to map a genealogical tree of all living things.
When he came to early versions of us, he had
no fossils to study. It was pretty much just guesswork.
(11:22):
He chose a rather insulting classification. The name that he
had for the predecessor of humans that would be the
Neanderthals basically was Homo stupidus. Yes, Homo stupidest. But it
was the French who really gave Neanderthals a bad name.
A nineteen oh eight, a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton was
(11:43):
found in a cave in the town of La Chapelle.
Ausan paleontologist Marcel Boule analyzed the remains of this individual
and made sweeping and hugely influential assumptions about the entire species.
The image that came of his work was hairy and
pretty ape like, with splayed toes and a slouching, hunched posture.
(12:11):
Kate Wong is a writer for Scientific American and what
researchers later determined was that this was an older individual,
this Nandertal, who had suffered from severe arthritis. So all
of the sort of features that led Bull to assume
that the species had these slouched, stooped traits were actually
(12:34):
the result of disease. That is really hilarious to me,
isn't it wild? And I've wondered about that before, Like,
when you find an individual species of something, what if
you're finding a weird member of that species and it
turns out that's exactly what happened with the Neanderthals. Totally
an agreement, fascinating and hilarious. But hold on, there's more.
(12:54):
The old Man of La Chapelle, as he came to
be known, became the public's picture of Neanderthals for generations.
They were the arcotopical cave people, and that image unfold
she has stuck with the Neandertos over one hundred years later.
Professor Chris Stringer, the research leader at the Natural History
Museum in London, tells me part of the problem was
(13:16):
that in the early twentieth century we didn't understand how
evolution worked. There was this rather simplistic idea that they
would be missing links to be found in the story
of human evolution. And it was because we were so
fixated on the idea of a missing link that we
typecast Neanderthals into the role of a half ap half
human caveman duke. But thanks to the rapid advancement and
(13:44):
the study of archaic humans, the image of the Neanderthal
is finally changing. To be sure, Neanderthals were different from
us in appearance. The pronounced brow ridge and sloping forehead
in those Geico commercials weren't tramped up by make up.
Our nests, so our brain case shape is rather globular,
sometimes described as like a soccer ball. The Neanderthal cranial
(14:07):
shape was longer and lower. In fact, the Neanderthal brain
was bigger than ours, as was the Neanderthal schnaz. We
guessed that the whole nose would have been broader. They
certainly seem to have had a nose that was capable
of very very heavy breathing. It may also have served
a function of warming up and humidifying the air when
(14:30):
they were living in relatively colder and drier conditions. They
were starkier too, with rib cages that flared out and
shorter limbs better for conserving heat. But recent studies on
the Neanderthal thorax suggest that they might have walked even
more upright than we do. As for what they sounded like,
Neanderthal voices might have been higher pitched than ours. Listen
(14:53):
to this simulation from the BBC. Let's just add a
bit of nasal, now push into me. This is actually
getting him right into his body. Now speak. No, that
isn't a monty python sketch. It's a serious demonstration. But
aside from the physical, what's really surprising is how on
(15:16):
par Neanderthals were with us cognitively and creatively. They made
a lot of the same kinds of tools they had fire,
They decorated their bodies with jewelry made from shells, eagle talons,
animal teeth, all sorts of fabulous accouterment. Some of these
(15:40):
discoveries of them using feathers systematically and collecting predominantly the
feathers of very dark black birds. We talk about it
as Neanderthal goth because it seems like they preferred these
dark raptors and dark crows and ravens and that sort
of thing. Some signists speculate that Neanderthals saw power in
(16:01):
these dark birds and thought they'd be imbued with that
power if they wore those feathers. And if you're picturing
share in Bob Backy at the nineteen eighty six Oscars,
I am too. And within just the past few years
researchers found the first ever Neanderthal cave paintings and etchings,
(16:21):
which reveal in early interest in social media. There's a
great place in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar that has this
what we call the Neanderthal hashtag because it looks like
that pound sign that is scratched onto the floor of
the cave. What it means, what it meant to them,
(16:46):
we have no idea, but it shows us some sign
from the past that these were thinking beings. They were
conveying something through their use of markings, through their use
of ornaments, and that something was social. It was something
about what they had to say to other individuals, what
they had to communicate about themselves. And when it came
(17:11):
to hunting, Neanderthals were pretty crafty. To attach tips to
their spears, they made their own glue. In order to
do that, you have to take birch bark and smoke
it down, reduce it at high temperature so that the
sap inside of it condenses into this sticky pitch and
that in the end makes a very very tiny amount
(17:33):
of this. So you've got to do this many times
to concentrate it. Neanderthals managed that process. If I had
to assign an engineering class to figure out how this
was done, they would have a hard time of it.
All to say that Neanderthals weren't the least bit stupidest,
and neither was Choca. And the Pecuni had a language.
(17:58):
It was developed by a UCLA language professor by the
name of Victoria Frankin. After all these years, Philip Paley
can still say some phrases in Paku. Well, these are
classic ones. Bungu sarissa taka and that means beware of
slee stack with an important warning very and uh. There's
(18:21):
also oh ganza bisasa what does that mean? Big magic?
I love? Who doesn't love big magic? And we're back
with Michaele and Black talking about what it really means
to be Meanderthal. But I mean they were capable of
(18:45):
language that we we we learned that right right. I
thought you were just belching. No, No, I was just
grunting in the Neanderthal Neanderthal like way. Right. We should
have done that at the top of the episode. So
there are two different ways to do it. I like
saying Meandrewthal. There are some people that will say Neandrew Tall.
So you are welcome. You can go back and forth.
You can switch over to neander Tall if you want.
(19:07):
I am now forevermore going to pronounce it Neander Tall. Okay,
so that's this scud. We're going to do a split
on this, and I'm going to stick with Neanderthal. You
stick with me Andrew Tall, and then everybody will be satisfied. Yeah.
Did you like Land of the Loss? I loved it.
There were these sid and Marty Croft shows, and in
my memory, that was the only tolerable one, Right, I
(19:29):
loved it. Yeah. I'm older than you are, so when
I watched it, I could tell it was pretty cheaply done.
But I liked the opening credits. That's what I like,
because it just seemed really exciting. Yeah, to me, there
was nothing cheap about it. It was as real as well.
Get rewatching a little bit of Captain Caveman that cartoon.
I remember that I was kind of attracted to Captain Caveman.
(19:54):
I there was something, maybe it was I don't know anyway,
And now when I go back and look at it,
I think it's kind of weird because he looks like
a testicle basically. Well, then that explains your attraction. Thank you.
So so, Michael. Now that we've established that Neanderthals were
(20:14):
intelligent and surprisingly similar to modern humans, that raises the
question why did Neanderthals go extinct? Now there are various
theories on this. First up, Professor Michael stab Vasser from
the University of Cologne in Germany. My speciality is a
subject called isotope geochemistry. Oh, he's got my old position.
(20:36):
That's what I did exactly. It is awkward for you. No, no, no, okay,
I mean so I asked him what he actually does.
It's almost like you're a weatherman for the ancient times. Yes,
you could say that. Yes, he didn't really like that line,
as he could tell anyway. He thinks it's climate change
that did in the Neanderthals. By studying stalagmites in caves,
(20:59):
he determined that during their last fifty thousand years on Earth,
the average temperature in the Danube Valley, one of the
places where Neanderthals lived, was much colder than it is now.
It was about thirty nine degrees fahrenheit. But and this
is crucial, during that period, there were these cold snaps
that would ultimately seal their fate. They lasted something between
(21:21):
a century and a millennium on average. They usually led
to temperature drops which could be up to let's say,
six to eight degrees today. It may not sound drastic,
but it makes the difference between being able to grow
crops or not, and if you can't eat, you're going
to die. And then as climate recovered, modern humans basically
(21:46):
resetted an empty area more or less. So he isn't
saying that modern humans were better adapted to these cold
temperatures in the Neanderthals. I think the point he's making
is that the extinction of Neanderthals was pretty much bad timing,
wrong place, wrong time. But they had existed for millennia
up until this point, and the average temperature as it's
(22:08):
going down could have forced them south into warmer climates.
But it seems like it didn't do that. I know,
I don't know why. This feels like a very dumb theory,
which is why we have another theory for you on
why Meanderthals died off. Okay, good, You remember Chris Stringer
from the Natural History Museum in London. He thinks the
(22:29):
small population of Neanderthals was essentially swallowed up by modern humans.
Some experts estimate that atops there were only about fifteen
nous in Neanderthals spread all across Eurasia. There just weren't
that many of them. The Neandersals were relatively low in numbers,
and I think that it probably wouldn't have taken much
to push them over the edge to extinction, and maybe
(22:50):
the appearance of modern humans as a competitor was sufficient
to do that. But of course that's just a guess. Yeah, well,
that just sounds like the most likely explanation. There was
a sharknado of humans that came in and just wiped
him out. I mean, we have a habit of doing that.
That's kind of what we do. It's who we are.
(23:13):
But who we are isn't who we used to think
we are. Doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo.
Of course, Neanderthals aren't really gone. They live in you
Michael and so many others. Let's find out what that
means today. What does it mean to have within our
(23:35):
genetic code a certain percentage of Neanderthal DNA? I wanted
to find out, so I'm heading to New Jersey to
talk to one of the foremost experts in the field.
My name is Josh Aki, and I'm a professor in
the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the Lewis
Sigler Institute for integrif Genomics at Princeton University. And you
(23:56):
do that all in one breath. With twenty three and me,
we can discover where in the world your DNA comes from.
An unforgettable gift my heritage DNA, What are your kid
At ancestry dna dot com. I spoke to Professor Ak
about what these DNA kits can tell us. It's one
thing to find out that from one of these mail
(24:16):
order things that you're ten percent Irish, ten percent Mediterranean,
you know, five percent African. But to find out that
your two point five percent Meandrethal, that's a whole other
level of self discovery. We've always said that our genomes
are a mosaic of different ancestors, and I think what
(24:36):
we've learned more recently is it's a mosaic of both
recent ancestors and very distantly related different types of human ancestors.
Before we could get to know what Neanderthal DNA looked like,
we had to truly understand our own DNA. More than
a thousand researchers across six nations have revealed nearly all
(24:57):
three billion letters of our miraculous a code. That was
President Bill Clinton back in the year two thousand announcing
the first time the human genome was sequenced. Then in
two thousand and six, Swedish scientist Savante Papa and his
team embarked upon sequencing the Neanderthal genome in a positively
(25:18):
Jurassic Parkian way. They were able to isolate ancient DNA
directly from a Neanderthal femur bone. So they drill into
the longbone and loud to a whole bunch of cleanup
procedures to try to make sure that you're just getting
Neanderthal DNA hall from this femur bone. Amazing. Once we
(25:42):
sequenced the Neanderthal genome, we were able to recognize that
we have what is called archaic DNA within our own genes.
And this bombshell told us a lot about what Neanderthals
and modern humans were doing with one another about forty
to fifty thousand years ago. It's been interestingly one of
(26:04):
the most hotly contested issues in science for thirty years,
with people arguing either there was admixture that happened between
Neanderthals and modern humans or there wasn't. He's talking about sex,
and recent studies suggest that they add mixed a lot. Okay,
So where did the modern humans in the Neanderthals end
(26:25):
up hooking up? That's a great question and something we
still don't know precisely. It seems to make most sense
that the initial rounds of hybridization happened shortly after modern
humans dispersed out of Africa. So maybe in Asia, minor
like in Turkey, modern levront of like in Syria and Jordan. Yeah, okay,
so it was a Middle Eastern that's where they got together.
(26:47):
That's yes. And I can't help but imagine it. I
mean in kind of a literal way. I mean, fifty
thousand years ago, modern humans coming out of Africa and
meeting a group of Neanderthals. Yeah, and what was that interaction?
Like what was the interaction with did the modern human
guy walk over to the female neanderthal and were they
saying like, stop, no, don't do it, She's not our kind.
(27:12):
There's so much we don't know, but we're learning more
every day thanks to Professor Aiki and his team. He
took me on a tour of their facility. So we're
going to go look at the experimental and computational space
in the Lewis Sigler Institute. You had to wear aaron
at um. No, we're not going to be baking, but
don't touch anything, okay. Mostly so these are my graduate
(27:38):
students pretending like they're working. This is all right, nice
to MITYA thesis project is on understanding how Neanderthal sequence
is distributed across the human genome. When you walk down
the street, do you ever sort of wonder the knee
(28:00):
anderthal content of different people. I'm actually really good at
picking that out just by looking at you. Yeah, how
much Neanderthal do you think is in me? Brush back
your hair a little bit. I think you're about one percent. Okay,
So my friend Michael Ian Black is two point nine
percent Neanderthal. He's an exceptional case. It's amazing had a picture. Wait,
(28:24):
let me just show you a picture of it. Look
at that to look at him, Yeah, I can definitely
see yeah, because he's got a small chin, and Neanderthals
are known for being relatively chinless, which is why I
think you're a lower because you have a nice, strong chin,
thank you. And he also has this sort of backward
sloping foreheads, which is also very um yeah, what we're
(28:46):
referred to as like archic. I don't feel like I
have a very weak chin. I don't have a we
don't have a clapped to deskue chin. I've never felt
the need to beard myself. You objectively do not have
a weak chin. But I do have a reverse sloping forehead.
He was right about that. But Tode's Roger Stone and
he's gorgeous. All right, all right, one out of two.
(29:10):
Let's get back to the beast. After meeting with grad
student Aaron, Professor Age set the record straight. Just because
someone has a lot of Neanderthal DNA doesn't mean his
or her physical appearance will reflect this. One of the
dirty secrets still about genetics is that we are not
very good at interpreting DNA sequence variation. So if I
(29:33):
look at my friend Michael and I see certain features
that may look like a rendering of a Neanderthal. That's
just a coincidence. It is most likely just a coincidence.
Most like you're leaving a little bit of room there.
We can never say things with a certainty and science
that's hysterical. All right, let's go downstairs because that's where
the fun toys are. This feels like the movie Coma,
(29:56):
Remember Coma. This is an aluminum high twenty five hundred instruments.
So this is one of the class of next generation sequencers.
You don't have to have large, intact fragments of DNA.
You can sequence from the small degraded fragments that most
Neanderthal ancient DNA exists in because it degrades over time
(30:20):
and you can sequence a lot of it. Knowing what
we do about Neanderthal DNA put the science fiction part
of my brain in full geek out mode. In our lifetime,
will we be able to see, you know, kind of
a living, breathing Neanderthal that's created in a lab. The
technology to do so arguably exist today. You can have
(30:41):
like a version of Sturbridge Village or Williamsburg, Virginia, just
a town with all Neanderthals building tools and grunting at
each other. I think it will ultimately be decided that
that's an unethical thing to do. Good, just because you
can do something doesn't mean you should do something. But
what does that Neanderthal DNA mean for us today? According
(31:03):
to Professor Ake, one of the benefits modern humans got
from mating with Neanderthals was it improved their immune systems.
It was a very efficient way for our ancestors to
quickly adapt to these new conditions was to have sex
with the neanderthal and just pick up a few beneficial
genes from the Anderthals. Great, okay, but you don't get
the benefits just from the sacks off. Your kids will
(31:24):
get it. Yes, yeah, it's a persistent benefit. I almost
never get sick per neanderthal thing. Yes, almost never. I
can't remember the last time I was sick. Wow, And
you have kids, have kids and the whole thing. I
never get the flu, I never get colds. I never
really get anything that is interesting. But wait, there's more
to the benefits of having Neanderthal DNA. There are a
(31:44):
few genes that are clearly important in early formation of skin,
like keratin proteins, and Neanderthals had nice nails. Perhaps it
was nice nails or hair. My nails I think are fine. Yeah,
I like your nils thinks I don't think me yet.
Your Neanderthal DNA does have some downsides. It may play
(32:05):
a factor in depression, and it may have something to
do with chain smoking. It just so happens that this
sequence now influences your ability to stop smoking. Okay, never smoked.
It's a good thing you've never smoked, because you'd find
it harder to quit. I may just take up the
habit just to see if it's right. Right, just contest
(32:26):
this proposition. One of the most mind blowing things the
field of archaic genomics has uncovered is that modern humans
and Neanderthals weren't the only people around thirty thousand years ago.
Forty thousand years ago, we walked around the Earth, we'd
find modern humans Neanderthals. Denisovans that if we went to
(32:49):
the island of Flores, we'd see the hobbit individuals. So
there was hobbits, Homo florencias, so very small, diminutive archaic
human types. So the world was a much more interesting place.
Fifty thousand years ago and today, the only remnants that
we see of these archaic forms of humans are the
(33:10):
scattered remains of their DNA and the genomes of modern individuals.
I may not only have Neanderthal DNA. I may have Denisovan, Hobbit,
or who knows what. So I decided to take a test.
Do you know one thing about myself? I wonder if
(33:33):
my caveman ancestors were any better? Opening packages, a saliva
collection kept and all right, no food or drink for
thirty minutes. So okay, spit to fill line. All right,
Oh god, that's a lot of spit. Twenty minutes later,
my cup runneth over with saliva. I have to say
(33:57):
this is bringing out a little bit of my competitive tendency.
I'm a little jealous that Michael is so neanderthal h
and I don't know. We'll see time to see who's
the neanderthalist of them all. And so I actually have
the result. I already looked, yet you haven't looked. I
(34:18):
have not looked. So I as you heard, I spit
in an envelope and sent it in, and I'm gonna look. Now,
your DNA tells a story of who you are, and
how you're connected to populations, trace your heritage through the
centuries and uncovered Cleo one hundred percent. What does that mean? Cleo? Yeah?
What is Cleo? Gideon? Hey Mo, remember you were a
(34:40):
little nervous about using your real name. I use the
name of my cat. Oh that's the name of Gideon's cat.
Is Cleo. I'm one hundred percent Cleo? He was like,
So I thought maybe it meant, oh, you've got a
one hundred percent of a mark for some disease that's
(35:00):
going to kill you, the Cleo disease. Okay, all right,
it's already says our ancestry composition. Your DNA suggests your
ancestry is forty point eight percent Iberian with ties to
five other populations. And I'm going to view report. Wow,
some over forty percent Spanish, okay, which is kind of sexy.
(35:22):
And did you know that? Well, my mother's Colombian. Okay,
so thirty point two percent Italian Italy. I'm point three
percent Ashkenazi Jewish? Are you yes? I It's interesting because
a cab driver the other day, asset, are you Jewish?
(35:42):
Said to you, are you Jewish? Yeah? And now you
can answer in the affirmative. Hell yes, I am yeah,
Hell yes, Okay, I'm three point five percent East Asian
and Native American. Oh that's what I was looking for.
Oh my god, I have it. Congrats, Thank you, God,
don't be jealous. Okay, two two point seven percent Native American, Columbia,
Venezuela plus three more, Goobab, Brazil and Maica. That's great.
(36:09):
I'm so excited. So where do I find my Neanderthal?
It was on a separate tab as far as I recall.
So it looks like I have only only two hundred
and thirty six Neanderthal variants, which puts me in the
bottom eleven percent in terms of Neanderthal content. Well, it
sounds like that researcher was right that you have less
(36:31):
Neanderthal than the average person. If you have less than
eighty nine percent of twenty three and ME customers, that
suggests to me you don't have very much at all. Right,
I guess that's what it means anyway. So okay, so
we can conclude I have virtually no Neanderthal, hence our
different pronunciations of Neanderthal. Yes, but you do have a
(36:51):
real smorgas board of all everything that I wanted, so
I wouldn't say it's a tie. I would say you're
slightly ahead. And the genetic lottery, you said a Samargus board,
but I have no Northern Europeans, so that's why we
should what would be something more Payea, which I love
it so much. Well, Mike lean Black, I want to
(37:17):
thank you, but you should really be thanking me because
this was about finding your roots since I'm basically zero
present Neanderthal. Well, thank you. I mean I really feel
like I learned a lot about myself, about my family.
I now know more about you and simultaneously think less
of you because you are not of my species. But yeah,
(37:38):
this was a blast. Before we close, a word from
the University of Wisconsin's John Hawks on his predecessors in
Neanderthal research, those people whose early analysis set the stage
for how Neanderthals were seen for so long. When we
look at the scientific world of the Victorian era, you're
(38:02):
looking at people who became aware of human variation around
the world, but they interpreted it in a very culturally
insensitive way. You look at the past and think, oh
my gosh, I can't believe that they said that. But
that was the way that they approached their science. Today
we look at things totally differently, and when we look
(38:23):
at extinct human groups, they had their own ways of
living in the world. You have to appreciate they're not us,
but they lived at a time with incredible challenges and
they overcame those challenges, and that is something really fundamentally
similar that we share with them today. We're all experts.
(38:45):
I mean, we can just spit in an envelope and
get all the answers right. Far from it. Let's all
hope that science and technology will allow us one day
to understand why a species of humans is advanced as
the Neanderthals disappeared from the planet, so that maybe, just
(39:05):
maybe we don't disappear, at least not before our next
episode of Mobituaries featuring the incomparable Sammy Davis Junior. I
certainly hope you enjoyed this episode and if you would,
(39:28):
please rate and review our podcast. You can also follow
Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me
on Twitter at Morocca tell me how Neanderthal you are.
For more great content, please visit mobituaries dot com. You
can subscribe to Mobituaries wherever you get your podcasts. This
episode of Mobituaries was produced by Gideon Evans. Our team
(39:51):
of producers also includes Megan Marcus, Keith mccauliffe, Megan Dietree,
and me Morocca. It was edited by David Fox and
neared by Dan de Zula. Indispensable support from Justin Ader, Genius, Dineski, Kiera, Wardlow,
Zach Gilcrest, the team at CBS News Radio, and Richard Rohrer.
(40:12):
Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Special thanks
du Gary Purdue, Ainara Sistiaga and London's Natural History Museum,
and has always undying thanks to Rand Morrison and John
carp without whom Mobituaries couldn't live. Hi, It's mo. If
(40:37):
you're enjoying Mobituaries the podcast, may I invite you to
check out Mobituaries the book. It's chock full of stories
not in the podcast. Celebrities who put their butts on
the line, sports teams that threw in the towel for good,
forgotten fashions, defunct diagnoses, presidential candidacies that cratered, whole countries
(40:59):
that went caput. And dragons, Yes, dragons, you see. People
used to believe the dragons will reel until just get
the book. You can order Mobituaries the book from any
online bookseller, or stop by your local bookstore and look
for me when I come to your city. Tour information
and lots more at mobituaries dot com
During the earliest days of this millennium, I took part
in a kind of history series, an ambitious survey that
explored milestones in American culture decade by decade. Of course
I'm talking about and after. I loved the apies there was,
(00:29):
and really who could forget What made Dynasty work was
the camp fights. Yeah, he went from John Cougar to
John Cougar Mellencamp and I thought, did he get married?
John Travolta's asked Urban Cowboy is if there should be
(00:49):
a shrine Delta. It was a classy show featuring a
panoply of commentators, and I was one of them, pondering
complex topics like nineteen eighties hospital dramas, saying elsewhere it
was and our long drama. It starred Mark Harman as
doctor Bobby Caldwell. Comedian and actor Michael Ian Black was
(01:11):
another contributor. I thought, if anything, the title That's Incredible,
it was an understatement of how incredible the things on
That's incredible work. We didn't really know each other back then,
but I distinctly remember his take on the nineteen eighty
one Neanderthal epic Quest for Fire. While most of us
were obsessed with the film's nudity, Michael took the high road.
(01:33):
I was really looking at it more from an anthropological
point of view than to see ray Don Jones tatas.
And it's that prehistory that's our subject this episode. Since
Quest for Fire, we've learned some stunning truths about Neanderthals,
and I knew who. I wanted to discuss this topic
(01:53):
with my friend Michael ian Black back when we were
loving the eighties. Neither of us knew just how connected
he is to our human cousins of four thousand decades ago.
If they had told me only how much Neanderthal I am,
I would have paid twice the amount for the test.
I'm mo Rocca. And this is mobituaries. This mobit Neanderthals
(02:24):
circa forty thousand years ago, death of a human species. Okay, first,
let's take care of some basics. The name Neanderthal comes
from the neander Valley in Germany, where one of the
first Neanderthal skulls was found in eighteen fifty six. At
the time, the fossil was misidentified as the skull of
(02:47):
a Cossack soldier from the Napoleonic Wars. They were only
off by a few tens of thousands of years now,
Neanderthals were also human, but a separate species Homo sapiens.
That's us and Neanderthals did share a common ancestor over
half a million years ago. Almo sapiens would go on
to flourish in Africa, while Neanderthals roamed across Europe and Asia,
(03:11):
adapting to a cold or harsher climate. Eventually the two
species did meet up. Then, about thirty to forty thousand
years ago, Neanderthals disappeared without a trace, or so we thought,
which brings me to my guest, Michael ian Black. So,
Michael Ian Black, thank you so much for joining me
(03:32):
for this whole episode. My pleasure. Let's get the promotion
out of the way first, because it's deserved. Your podcast,
How to Be Amazing is amazing. Yes, you can be
on it. No, yes, I think that's where I was going.
So years ago I interviewed you about your one of
your books, Naval Gazing, and in it you talked about
(03:53):
genetic testing and why did you go about investigating your
genetic makeup? I think the same reason most people do,
just curiosity. I just wanted to know genetically speaking, who
I am. I had it in my head that I
must be at least a pastiche of things, some kind
(04:15):
of milange. I was hoping to find some African Americans,
some Native American but the results were so disappointingly kind
of exactly what I had been led to believe, which
is that I am a hundred percent Ashkenazi Jew. I
do think the food is better than Sephardic food. Delicious,
(04:36):
delicious if you just take the gafiltha fish out of
that which I have always associated and will always associate
with just jellied cat turns. But but you say you
found out you were one hundred percent Ashkenazic Jew. But
that's not quite right. Well, it is in terms of ethicity.
(04:58):
But there was also a marker which I didn't know
till I got it back from the company that says
it will also tell you your Neanderthal percentages. If they
had told me only how much Neanderthal I am, I
would have paid twice the amount for the test, because
for some reason, that just really captured my imagination to think, oh,
(05:20):
I may be part of an entirely different species. Right.
That was thrilling to me, And I didn't know that
they had developed the test, and I found out that
I am two point nine percent Neanderthal, which is greater
than the norm. The average is a two point seven percent. Okay,
(05:41):
that's a significant difference. I mean, I can't tell you
how delighted I was to hear this, because your listeners
can't see me, but you can probably tell by the
way I speak in the timber of my voice that
I am not the most masculine of fellows. But I
was going to say, I mean, I mean, I'm tolerant,
(06:03):
but to a point. But just the popular image of
the Neanderthal as a lumbering brute, as this strong survivor
out on the steps end planes just thrilled me to
no end. And so I was delighted. And I told
my wife that I am above averagely Neanderthal, and she said,
(06:25):
that's why you look like that, and she did not
mean it as a compliment. And let me just say
that Martha is highly evolved. She's basically Darryl Hannah and
Clanta the Cave Bear, a highly evolved, leggy blonde. Yes
she is, but wait, wait, hold on, When you describe
Neanderthals as masculine, lumbering brutes. You're making certain assumptions, and
(06:47):
we'll dispel some of these in this episode. For instance,
how do we know there weren't cultured, epicy Neanderthals? Well,
I think we do know now you are doing the research.
And I'm just speaking off the top of my head.
Now they were conness of fine wine, is my understanding.
They did puppet shows. Oh, Michael, We've got some work
to do. Think of me as your Henry Lewis Skates
(07:08):
and this is finding your roots, or as your Lisa
Kudrow and this is who do you think you are?
I think that's her show. I want you to know
that your Neanderthal ancestors were pretty darned special and not
as different from us normal people as you may think.
So how did they get such a bad rap? Let's
find out. I grew up with so many classic TV
(07:36):
shows and films about Neanderthals and cavemen, and they pretty
much all got it wrong. In nineteen eighty one, there
was the aforementioned Quest for Fire. The characters basically just
plump through the whole movie, except when one of them
gets beamed in the head by a rock and then
(07:57):
everyone laughs. That same year, moviegoers were subjected to the
ringo star vehicle Caveman. During the course of the movie,
a bunch of bumbling cavemen discover fire, how to light
farts on fire, and jam bands and who could forget
(08:25):
the mel Blanc voiced cartoon character. But as far as
portrayals of the primordial go the show that had the
biggest impact on me was Land of the Lost. The
theme song told the story of the series. It's about
(08:46):
a family on a river rafting trip. During the ride,
they go down a magical waterfall and enter a universe
filled with dinosaurs and cave creatures. Hi, I'm Phil Paley
and I played Chocca on the seventies show Land of
(09:09):
the Lost. You were only nine years old when he
got this role. Tell us about the character. Chaca was
the youngest of the pacoony clan. What do you think
he is? Who kind of a came in a monkey
or what? Chaca? I wore a prosthetic headpiece, so it
(09:30):
had a very prominent brow and forehead, so it did
kind of look neanderthal ish. I guess back when I
watched the show, I kind of assumed Chocca was a Neanderthal.
But looking back at the clips. Now he seems more
monkey boy free all over, except for his face. The
suit was made out of like nylon pantyhose material with
(09:51):
a real human hair hand sewn into it, so it
made it kind of itchy. Luckily, there are some people
who know the difference between Saturday Morning science fiction and
real science. Anything that depicts Neanderthals as basically bad hair,
that's what I laugh about. Professor John Hawks from the
University of Wisconsin at o'claire is one of the world's
(10:13):
leading experts on Neanderthals. Why have Neanderthals had such a
bad reputation. The Neanderthals are a group that doesn't have
an advocacy. They don't have a lobby. You know, there's
there's not Neanderthal representatives calling their congressman and so as
a consequence, if you thought something bad about the past,
(10:37):
you know, they were a convenient group because they weren't
going to complain. It's so easy to use Geico dot com.
A caveman could do it. What not cool? I did
not know you were there. The Neanderthals in those Geico
commercials might be funny, but make no mistake, we're laughing
at them. So how did this stereotyping of Meanderthals as brutish,
(11:01):
howling and stupid get started? John Hawkes says it may
have begun with a nineteenth century German biologist named Ernst Heckel,
who attempted to map a genealogical tree of all living things.
When he came to early versions of us, he had
no fossils to study. It was pretty much just guesswork.
(11:22):
He chose a rather insulting classification. The name that he
had for the predecessor of humans that would be the
Neanderthals basically was Homo stupidus. Yes, Homo stupidest. But it
was the French who really gave Neanderthals a bad name.
A nineteen oh eight, a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton was
(11:43):
found in a cave in the town of La Chapelle.
Ausan paleontologist Marcel Boule analyzed the remains of this individual
and made sweeping and hugely influential assumptions about the entire species.
The image that came of his work was hairy and
pretty ape like, with splayed toes and a slouching, hunched posture.
(12:11):
Kate Wong is a writer for Scientific American and what
researchers later determined was that this was an older individual,
this Nandertal, who had suffered from severe arthritis. So all
of the sort of features that led Bull to assume
that the species had these slouched, stooped traits were actually
(12:34):
the result of disease. That is really hilarious to me,
isn't it wild? And I've wondered about that before, Like,
when you find an individual species of something, what if
you're finding a weird member of that species and it
turns out that's exactly what happened with the Neanderthals. Totally
an agreement, fascinating and hilarious. But hold on, there's more.
(12:54):
The old Man of La Chapelle, as he came to
be known, became the public's picture of Neanderthals for generations.
They were the arcotopical cave people, and that image unfold
she has stuck with the Neandertos over one hundred years later.
Professor Chris Stringer, the research leader at the Natural History
Museum in London, tells me part of the problem was
(13:16):
that in the early twentieth century we didn't understand how
evolution worked. There was this rather simplistic idea that they
would be missing links to be found in the story
of human evolution. And it was because we were so
fixated on the idea of a missing link that we
typecast Neanderthals into the role of a half ap half
human caveman duke. But thanks to the rapid advancement and
(13:44):
the study of archaic humans, the image of the Neanderthal
is finally changing. To be sure, Neanderthals were different from
us in appearance. The pronounced brow ridge and sloping forehead
in those Geico commercials weren't tramped up by make up.
Our nests, so our brain case shape is rather globular,
sometimes described as like a soccer ball. The Neanderthal cranial
(14:07):
shape was longer and lower. In fact, the Neanderthal brain
was bigger than ours, as was the Neanderthal schnaz. We
guessed that the whole nose would have been broader. They
certainly seem to have had a nose that was capable
of very very heavy breathing. It may also have served
a function of warming up and humidifying the air when
(14:30):
they were living in relatively colder and drier conditions. They
were starkier too, with rib cages that flared out and
shorter limbs better for conserving heat. But recent studies on
the Neanderthal thorax suggest that they might have walked even
more upright than we do. As for what they sounded like,
Neanderthal voices might have been higher pitched than ours. Listen
(14:53):
to this simulation from the BBC. Let's just add a
bit of nasal, now push into me. This is actually
getting him right into his body. Now speak. No, that
isn't a monty python sketch. It's a serious demonstration. But
aside from the physical, what's really surprising is how on
(15:16):
par Neanderthals were with us cognitively and creatively. They made
a lot of the same kinds of tools they had fire,
They decorated their bodies with jewelry made from shells, eagle talons,
animal teeth, all sorts of fabulous accouterment. Some of these
(15:40):
discoveries of them using feathers systematically and collecting predominantly the
feathers of very dark black birds. We talk about it
as Neanderthal goth because it seems like they preferred these
dark raptors and dark crows and ravens and that sort
of thing. Some signists speculate that Neanderthals saw power in
(16:01):
these dark birds and thought they'd be imbued with that
power if they wore those feathers. And if you're picturing
share in Bob Backy at the nineteen eighty six Oscars,
I am too. And within just the past few years
researchers found the first ever Neanderthal cave paintings and etchings,
(16:21):
which reveal in early interest in social media. There's a
great place in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar that has this
what we call the Neanderthal hashtag because it looks like
that pound sign that is scratched onto the floor of
the cave. What it means, what it meant to them,
(16:46):
we have no idea, but it shows us some sign
from the past that these were thinking beings. They were
conveying something through their use of markings, through their use
of ornaments, and that something was social. It was something
about what they had to say to other individuals, what
they had to communicate about themselves. And when it came
(17:11):
to hunting, Neanderthals were pretty crafty. To attach tips to
their spears, they made their own glue. In order to
do that, you have to take birch bark and smoke
it down, reduce it at high temperature so that the
sap inside of it condenses into this sticky pitch and
that in the end makes a very very tiny amount
(17:33):
of this. So you've got to do this many times
to concentrate it. Neanderthals managed that process. If I had
to assign an engineering class to figure out how this
was done, they would have a hard time of it.
All to say that Neanderthals weren't the least bit stupidest,
and neither was Choca. And the Pecuni had a language.
(17:58):
It was developed by a UCLA language professor by the
name of Victoria Frankin. After all these years, Philip Paley
can still say some phrases in Paku. Well, these are
classic ones. Bungu sarissa taka and that means beware of
slee stack with an important warning very and uh. There's
(18:21):
also oh ganza bisasa what does that mean? Big magic?
I love? Who doesn't love big magic? And we're back
with Michaele and Black talking about what it really means
to be Meanderthal. But I mean they were capable of
(18:45):
language that we we we learned that right right. I
thought you were just belching. No, No, I was just
grunting in the Neanderthal Neanderthal like way. Right. We should
have done that at the top of the episode. So
there are two different ways to do it. I like
saying Meandrewthal. There are some people that will say Neandrew Tall.
So you are welcome. You can go back and forth.
You can switch over to neander Tall if you want.
(19:07):
I am now forevermore going to pronounce it Neander Tall. Okay,
so that's this scud. We're going to do a split
on this, and I'm going to stick with Neanderthal. You
stick with me Andrew Tall, and then everybody will be satisfied. Yeah.
Did you like Land of the Loss? I loved it.
There were these sid and Marty Croft shows, and in
my memory, that was the only tolerable one, Right, I
(19:29):
loved it. Yeah. I'm older than you are, so when
I watched it, I could tell it was pretty cheaply done.
But I liked the opening credits. That's what I like,
because it just seemed really exciting. Yeah, to me, there
was nothing cheap about it. It was as real as well.
Get rewatching a little bit of Captain Caveman that cartoon.
I remember that I was kind of attracted to Captain Caveman.
(19:54):
I there was something, maybe it was I don't know anyway,
And now when I go back and look at it,
I think it's kind of weird because he looks like
a testicle basically. Well, then that explains your attraction. Thank you.
So so, Michael. Now that we've established that Neanderthals were
(20:14):
intelligent and surprisingly similar to modern humans, that raises the
question why did Neanderthals go extinct? Now there are various
theories on this. First up, Professor Michael stab Vasser from
the University of Cologne in Germany. My speciality is a
subject called isotope geochemistry. Oh, he's got my old position.
(20:36):
That's what I did exactly. It is awkward for you. No, no, no, okay,
I mean so I asked him what he actually does.
It's almost like you're a weatherman for the ancient times. Yes,
you could say that. Yes, he didn't really like that line,
as he could tell anyway. He thinks it's climate change
that did in the Neanderthals. By studying stalagmites in caves,
(20:59):
he determined that during their last fifty thousand years on Earth,
the average temperature in the Danube Valley, one of the
places where Neanderthals lived, was much colder than it is now.
It was about thirty nine degrees fahrenheit. But and this
is crucial, during that period, there were these cold snaps
that would ultimately seal their fate. They lasted something between
(21:21):
a century and a millennium on average. They usually led
to temperature drops which could be up to let's say,
six to eight degrees today. It may not sound drastic,
but it makes the difference between being able to grow
crops or not, and if you can't eat, you're going
to die. And then as climate recovered, modern humans basically
(21:46):
resetted an empty area more or less. So he isn't
saying that modern humans were better adapted to these cold
temperatures in the Neanderthals. I think the point he's making
is that the extinction of Neanderthals was pretty much bad timing,
wrong place, wrong time. But they had existed for millennia
up until this point, and the average temperature as it's
(22:08):
going down could have forced them south into warmer climates.
But it seems like it didn't do that. I know,
I don't know why. This feels like a very dumb theory,
which is why we have another theory for you on
why Meanderthals died off. Okay, good, You remember Chris Stringer
from the Natural History Museum in London. He thinks the
(22:29):
small population of Neanderthals was essentially swallowed up by modern humans.
Some experts estimate that atops there were only about fifteen
nous in Neanderthals spread all across Eurasia. There just weren't
that many of them. The Neandersals were relatively low in numbers,
and I think that it probably wouldn't have taken much
to push them over the edge to extinction, and maybe
(22:50):
the appearance of modern humans as a competitor was sufficient
to do that. But of course that's just a guess. Yeah, well,
that just sounds like the most likely explanation. There was
a sharknado of humans that came in and just wiped
him out. I mean, we have a habit of doing that.
That's kind of what we do. It's who we are.
(23:13):
But who we are isn't who we used to think
we are. Doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo.
Of course, Neanderthals aren't really gone. They live in you
Michael and so many others. Let's find out what that
means today. What does it mean to have within our
(23:35):
genetic code a certain percentage of Neanderthal DNA? I wanted
to find out, so I'm heading to New Jersey to
talk to one of the foremost experts in the field.
My name is Josh Aki, and I'm a professor in
the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the Lewis
Sigler Institute for integrif Genomics at Princeton University. And you
(23:56):
do that all in one breath. With twenty three and me,
we can discover where in the world your DNA comes from.
An unforgettable gift my heritage DNA, What are your kid
At ancestry dna dot com. I spoke to Professor Ak
about what these DNA kits can tell us. It's one
thing to find out that from one of these mail
(24:16):
order things that you're ten percent Irish, ten percent Mediterranean,
you know, five percent African. But to find out that
your two point five percent Meandrethal, that's a whole other
level of self discovery. We've always said that our genomes
are a mosaic of different ancestors, and I think what
(24:36):
we've learned more recently is it's a mosaic of both
recent ancestors and very distantly related different types of human ancestors.
Before we could get to know what Neanderthal DNA looked like,
we had to truly understand our own DNA. More than
a thousand researchers across six nations have revealed nearly all
(24:57):
three billion letters of our miraculous a code. That was
President Bill Clinton back in the year two thousand announcing
the first time the human genome was sequenced. Then in
two thousand and six, Swedish scientist Savante Papa and his
team embarked upon sequencing the Neanderthal genome in a positively
(25:18):
Jurassic Parkian way. They were able to isolate ancient DNA
directly from a Neanderthal femur bone. So they drill into
the longbone and loud to a whole bunch of cleanup
procedures to try to make sure that you're just getting
Neanderthal DNA hall from this femur bone. Amazing. Once we
(25:42):
sequenced the Neanderthal genome, we were able to recognize that
we have what is called archaic DNA within our own genes.
And this bombshell told us a lot about what Neanderthals
and modern humans were doing with one another about forty
to fifty thousand years ago. It's been interestingly one of
(26:04):
the most hotly contested issues in science for thirty years,
with people arguing either there was admixture that happened between
Neanderthals and modern humans or there wasn't. He's talking about sex,
and recent studies suggest that they add mixed a lot. Okay,
So where did the modern humans in the Neanderthals end
(26:25):
up hooking up? That's a great question and something we
still don't know precisely. It seems to make most sense
that the initial rounds of hybridization happened shortly after modern
humans dispersed out of Africa. So maybe in Asia, minor
like in Turkey, modern levront of like in Syria and Jordan. Yeah, okay,
so it was a Middle Eastern that's where they got together.
(26:47):
That's yes. And I can't help but imagine it. I
mean in kind of a literal way. I mean, fifty
thousand years ago, modern humans coming out of Africa and
meeting a group of Neanderthals. Yeah, and what was that interaction?
Like what was the interaction with did the modern human
guy walk over to the female neanderthal and were they
saying like, stop, no, don't do it, She's not our kind.
(27:12):
There's so much we don't know, but we're learning more
every day thanks to Professor Aiki and his team. He
took me on a tour of their facility. So we're
going to go look at the experimental and computational space
in the Lewis Sigler Institute. You had to wear aaron
at um. No, we're not going to be baking, but
don't touch anything, okay. Mostly so these are my graduate
(27:38):
students pretending like they're working. This is all right, nice
to MITYA thesis project is on understanding how Neanderthal sequence
is distributed across the human genome. When you walk down
the street, do you ever sort of wonder the knee
(28:00):
anderthal content of different people. I'm actually really good at
picking that out just by looking at you. Yeah, how
much Neanderthal do you think is in me? Brush back
your hair a little bit. I think you're about one percent. Okay,
So my friend Michael Ian Black is two point nine
percent Neanderthal. He's an exceptional case. It's amazing had a picture. Wait,
(28:24):
let me just show you a picture of it. Look
at that to look at him, Yeah, I can definitely
see yeah, because he's got a small chin, and Neanderthals
are known for being relatively chinless, which is why I
think you're a lower because you have a nice, strong chin,
thank you. And he also has this sort of backward
sloping foreheads, which is also very um yeah, what we're
(28:46):
referred to as like archic. I don't feel like I
have a very weak chin. I don't have a we
don't have a clapped to deskue chin. I've never felt
the need to beard myself. You objectively do not have
a weak chin. But I do have a reverse sloping forehead.
He was right about that. But Tode's Roger Stone and
he's gorgeous. All right, all right, one out of two.
(29:10):
Let's get back to the beast. After meeting with grad
student Aaron, Professor Age set the record straight. Just because
someone has a lot of Neanderthal DNA doesn't mean his
or her physical appearance will reflect this. One of the
dirty secrets still about genetics is that we are not
very good at interpreting DNA sequence variation. So if I
(29:33):
look at my friend Michael and I see certain features
that may look like a rendering of a Neanderthal. That's
just a coincidence. It is most likely just a coincidence.
Most like you're leaving a little bit of room there.
We can never say things with a certainty and science
that's hysterical. All right, let's go downstairs because that's where
the fun toys are. This feels like the movie Coma,
(29:56):
Remember Coma. This is an aluminum high twenty five hundred instruments.
So this is one of the class of next generation sequencers.
You don't have to have large, intact fragments of DNA.
You can sequence from the small degraded fragments that most
Neanderthal ancient DNA exists in because it degrades over time
(30:20):
and you can sequence a lot of it. Knowing what
we do about Neanderthal DNA put the science fiction part
of my brain in full geek out mode. In our lifetime,
will we be able to see, you know, kind of
a living, breathing Neanderthal that's created in a lab. The
technology to do so arguably exist today. You can have
(30:41):
like a version of Sturbridge Village or Williamsburg, Virginia, just
a town with all Neanderthals building tools and grunting at
each other. I think it will ultimately be decided that
that's an unethical thing to do. Good, just because you
can do something doesn't mean you should do something. But
what does that Neanderthal DNA mean for us today? According
(31:03):
to Professor Ake, one of the benefits modern humans got
from mating with Neanderthals was it improved their immune systems.
It was a very efficient way for our ancestors to
quickly adapt to these new conditions was to have sex
with the neanderthal and just pick up a few beneficial
genes from the Anderthals. Great, okay, but you don't get
the benefits just from the sacks off. Your kids will
(31:24):
get it. Yes, yeah, it's a persistent benefit. I almost
never get sick per neanderthal thing. Yes, almost never. I
can't remember the last time I was sick. Wow, And
you have kids, have kids and the whole thing. I
never get the flu, I never get colds. I never
really get anything that is interesting. But wait, there's more
to the benefits of having Neanderthal DNA. There are a
(31:44):
few genes that are clearly important in early formation of skin,
like keratin proteins, and Neanderthals had nice nails. Perhaps it
was nice nails or hair. My nails I think are fine. Yeah,
I like your nils thinks I don't think me yet.
Your Neanderthal DNA does have some downsides. It may play
(32:05):
a factor in depression, and it may have something to
do with chain smoking. It just so happens that this
sequence now influences your ability to stop smoking. Okay, never smoked.
It's a good thing you've never smoked, because you'd find
it harder to quit. I may just take up the
habit just to see if it's right. Right, just contest
(32:26):
this proposition. One of the most mind blowing things the
field of archaic genomics has uncovered is that modern humans
and Neanderthals weren't the only people around thirty thousand years ago.
Forty thousand years ago, we walked around the Earth, we'd
find modern humans Neanderthals. Denisovans that if we went to
(32:49):
the island of Flores, we'd see the hobbit individuals. So
there was hobbits, Homo florencias, so very small, diminutive archaic
human types. So the world was a much more interesting place.
Fifty thousand years ago and today, the only remnants that
we see of these archaic forms of humans are the
(33:10):
scattered remains of their DNA and the genomes of modern individuals.
I may not only have Neanderthal DNA. I may have Denisovan, Hobbit,
or who knows what. So I decided to take a test.
Do you know one thing about myself? I wonder if
(33:33):
my caveman ancestors were any better? Opening packages, a saliva
collection kept and all right, no food or drink for
thirty minutes. So okay, spit to fill line. All right,
Oh god, that's a lot of spit. Twenty minutes later,
my cup runneth over with saliva. I have to say
(33:57):
this is bringing out a little bit of my competitive tendency.
I'm a little jealous that Michael is so neanderthal h
and I don't know. We'll see time to see who's
the neanderthalist of them all. And so I actually have
the result. I already looked, yet you haven't looked. I
(34:18):
have not looked. So I as you heard, I spit
in an envelope and sent it in, and I'm gonna look. Now,
your DNA tells a story of who you are, and
how you're connected to populations, trace your heritage through the
centuries and uncovered Cleo one hundred percent. What does that mean? Cleo? Yeah?
What is Cleo? Gideon? Hey Mo, remember you were a
(34:40):
little nervous about using your real name. I use the
name of my cat. Oh that's the name of Gideon's cat.
Is Cleo. I'm one hundred percent Cleo? He was like,
So I thought maybe it meant, oh, you've got a
one hundred percent of a mark for some disease that's
(35:00):
going to kill you, the Cleo disease. Okay, all right,
it's already says our ancestry composition. Your DNA suggests your
ancestry is forty point eight percent Iberian with ties to
five other populations. And I'm going to view report. Wow,
some over forty percent Spanish, okay, which is kind of sexy.
(35:22):
And did you know that? Well, my mother's Colombian. Okay,
so thirty point two percent Italian Italy. I'm point three
percent Ashkenazi Jewish? Are you yes? I It's interesting because
a cab driver the other day, asset, are you Jewish?
(35:42):
Said to you, are you Jewish? Yeah? And now you
can answer in the affirmative. Hell yes, I am yeah,
Hell yes, Okay, I'm three point five percent East Asian
and Native American. Oh that's what I was looking for.
Oh my god, I have it. Congrats, Thank you, God,
don't be jealous. Okay, two two point seven percent Native American, Columbia,
Venezuela plus three more, Goobab, Brazil and Maica. That's great.
(36:09):
I'm so excited. So where do I find my Neanderthal?
It was on a separate tab as far as I recall.
So it looks like I have only only two hundred
and thirty six Neanderthal variants, which puts me in the
bottom eleven percent in terms of Neanderthal content. Well, it
sounds like that researcher was right that you have less
(36:31):
Neanderthal than the average person. If you have less than
eighty nine percent of twenty three and ME customers, that
suggests to me you don't have very much at all. Right,
I guess that's what it means anyway. So okay, so
we can conclude I have virtually no Neanderthal, hence our
different pronunciations of Neanderthal. Yes, but you do have a
(36:51):
real smorgas board of all everything that I wanted, so
I wouldn't say it's a tie. I would say you're
slightly ahead. And the genetic lottery, you said a Samargus board,
but I have no Northern Europeans, so that's why we
should what would be something more Payea, which I love
it so much. Well, Mike lean Black, I want to
(37:17):
thank you, but you should really be thanking me because
this was about finding your roots since I'm basically zero
present Neanderthal. Well, thank you. I mean I really feel
like I learned a lot about myself, about my family.
I now know more about you and simultaneously think less
of you because you are not of my species. But yeah,
(37:38):
this was a blast. Before we close, a word from
the University of Wisconsin's John Hawks on his predecessors in
Neanderthal research, those people whose early analysis set the stage
for how Neanderthals were seen for so long. When we
look at the scientific world of the Victorian era, you're
(38:02):
looking at people who became aware of human variation around
the world, but they interpreted it in a very culturally
insensitive way. You look at the past and think, oh
my gosh, I can't believe that they said that. But
that was the way that they approached their science. Today
we look at things totally differently, and when we look
(38:23):
at extinct human groups, they had their own ways of
living in the world. You have to appreciate they're not us,
but they lived at a time with incredible challenges and
they overcame those challenges, and that is something really fundamentally
similar that we share with them today. We're all experts.
(38:45):
I mean, we can just spit in an envelope and
get all the answers right. Far from it. Let's all
hope that science and technology will allow us one day
to understand why a species of humans is advanced as
the Neanderthals disappeared from the planet, so that maybe, just
(39:05):
maybe we don't disappear, at least not before our next
episode of Mobituaries featuring the incomparable Sammy Davis Junior. I
certainly hope you enjoyed this episode and if you would,
(39:28):
please rate and review our podcast. You can also follow
Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me
on Twitter at Morocca tell me how Neanderthal you are.
For more great content, please visit mobituaries dot com. You
can subscribe to Mobituaries wherever you get your podcasts. This
episode of Mobituaries was produced by Gideon Evans. Our team
(39:51):
of producers also includes Megan Marcus, Keith mccauliffe, Megan Dietree,
and me Morocca. It was edited by David Fox and
neared by Dan de Zula. Indispensable support from Justin Ader, Genius, Dineski, Kiera, Wardlow,
Zach Gilcrest, the team at CBS News Radio, and Richard Rohrer.
(40:12):
Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Special thanks
du Gary Purdue, Ainara Sistiaga and London's Natural History Museum,
and has always undying thanks to Rand Morrison and John
carp without whom Mobituaries couldn't live. Hi, It's mo. If
(40:37):
you're enjoying Mobituaries the podcast, may I invite you to
check out Mobituaries the book. It's chock full of stories
not in the podcast. Celebrities who put their butts on
the line, sports teams that threw in the towel for good,
forgotten fashions, defunct diagnoses, presidential candidacies that cratered, whole countries
(40:59):
that went caput. And dragons, Yes, dragons, you see. People
used to believe the dragons will reel until just get
the book. You can order Mobituaries the book from any
online bookseller, or stop by your local bookstore and look
for me when I come to your city. Tour information
and lots more at mobituaries dot com
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