Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Neanderthal Sex

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

What comes to mind when you think of a neanderthal? Probably a hunched, hairy, grunting version of a man who’s shuffling around his cave some 40,000 years ago.How accurate is this reputation? What were their sex lives like? And how much did they go back to the caves of us Homo sapiens? Joining us is to explore the life and sex of neanderthals, is Palaeolithic archaeologist and author of Growing Up In The Ice Age, April Nowell.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT - sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely Bertwitsters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Hey Kate, what's a fair do's warning? Well, that is the warning that we have to give at the top of each show to make sure that everyone knows. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults,

to other adults about adultery things, covering a range of adult subjects and in an adulty way, and you should be an adult too. And now we've got that little lot out of the way. Well, if you happen to keep listening and you happen to get offended, don't come crying to us. Because fair do's, we did tell you. Gone breaks on a new day, some 40,000 years ago, like quite a while ago. And we are on a landmass that will later be called Spain.

It's quiet, apart from some birds in the distance flying over vast plains. It's also bloody freezing. I am trying to have a cozy, relaxing day in my cave, all wrapped up in my animal fur blankets. Fou-fur is not a thing yet, so vegans don't come for us. But even more concerning, there's this Neanderthal fella that I brought back to the cave the other night, and he won't sod off.

He's out there roaming around somewhere trying to get my attention. He's actually a lot smarter and more capable than you, think a Neanderthal will be, but this is just never going to work with different species. And you might think that I'm being mean, ignoring this guy, but I'm not on my own. In fact, as we will find out, the practice of Homo sapiens ghosting Neanderthals is a pretty established practice at this point. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and a lot. Oh, good. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society.

With me, Kate Lister. When we describe someone as a Neanderthal, or a Neanderthal, depending on your choice, we tend to think of a hunch-backed, grunting, squatting, hairy caveman type, right? Which, you know, there was a time and a place for, definitely. But in truth, Neanderthals were every bit as smart and complex as homo sapiens.

They really were. And joining us to explore the life and sex lives of Neanderthals is Paleolithic archaeologist and author of Growing Up in the Ice Age, April No-Well. Were Neanderthals monogamous? How much inbreeding was there with homo sapiens and are we really to blame for their extinction? Well, I am ready to find out if you are. Betwixters. Oh, and welcome to Betwixter Sheets.

It's only April Noel. How are you doing? I'm fine. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here with you. I'm beyond thrilled that you are here because your specialist area of study is the Neanderthals. I can't wait to learn more about it. It's a subject that I know very, very little.

I think I've dated a few, but it's something I know very, you and me both. You and me both. You and me both. Very little. But my first question is, what brought you to this area of study? Why Neanderthal? Is it Neanderthal or Neanderthal? I've heard people pronounce it differently.

Yeah, that's a good question. Actually, so both are correct because the first Neanderthal that was, well, I say tall, so the first Neanderthal that was recognized as an extinct human was found in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856. And so Tall is the German word for Valley. And so they changed it at some point from Thal to Tall. So that's why a lot of people say Neanderthal now, but either is correct. What brought you to the study of Neanderthals? You know, I've just always been really fascinated with human evolution broadly. But when I started to read about Neanderthals, I just, I don't know, I fell in love. Just so interesting, you know, in the sense that they're really similar to us, but not exactly

like us. And they've died out relatively recently, only about maybe 40,000 years ago. And so when you think about the large swath of time that human ancestors have been on the earth, we can trace our evolution back six, seven, eight million years. Neanderthals are really, you know, quite recent. So I think for that reason, there's so fast. fascinating. As paleoanthropologists, we often think of our main goal is trying to figure out what makes us human. And by definition, that means sort of focusing on what makes us special or interesting or whatever. And often that means that we look to the Neanderthal to kind of help us figure out what makes a special. Sort of by default, we use them as that boundary between human and not human. And we sort of think about them as a mirror. ourselves in a way. So I think that's what draws a lot of people to studying Neanderthals.

And they do have this reputation. And I did it just earlier when I said, oh, I've dated a few. And what I mean by that is I've dated a few big, hairy, idiot, lugging, barely string a sentence. Why do I even think of a Neanderthal like that? Where did that come from? This idea that they were just like big daft idiots wandering around? Absolutely. So we have this sort of, caveman myth, right, of as you say, of a large, hairy, it's always a male, right, with a club and dragging a female behind him. And so, like, this horrible sort of thing. And it's really a couple of things. So when Neanderthals were first discovered, you know, it was in 1856. It was three years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species. And it was kind of what we call a premature discovery.

So people weren't really ready at that time to be able to fit a. Neanderthal into their world view. So it was either, you know, this was a species that was anti-deluvian. So in other words, it must have been a species that was around before the biblical flood and it just didn't make it on the arc, you know, or them in the unicorns, right? Yes. Wait, that was it too? I thought we were meeting. Anyways, science simpler when you could have that as a solution. Exactly. Or they were thought of as pathological modern humans, or they were thought of as an extinct form of human race, like, but an inferior one. And I'm going to put that all in quotes. And one of the earliest reconstructions of Neanderthals was a faulty reconstruction. They didn't realize this individual had osteoarthritis and so on. So when they reconstructed him as this kind of hunched over shuffling individual, it wasn't representative of all Neanderthals, but that really stuck in our brain. And it wasn't until more Neanderthals were found and better reconstructions were done.

And also, when we started to find even older human ancestors like Homo erectus and Australopithecines who look really weird in comparison, you know, and that wasn't until the late 1800s, early 1900s, that all of a sudden Neanderthals were like, they're not so bad. We don't bite having them as our relatives. But it took a while for that. And so that still is very pervasive. So when you call someone a Neanderthal, today you're not generally meaning that in a flattering kind of way. Calling someone like an Australopithecus doesn't have quite the same force.

It doesn't just roll off the tag, you know. The same way. Can I ask, this is a really start a question, are they types of human? Are we different species? Are we like, how are we related to one another? Sure. So around 550,000 to 770,000 years ago, so it's kind of hard to wrap our brains around how long ago that is. Long time ago, we shared a common ancestor with the line that would eventually lead to us to Homo sapiens. And so Homo sapiens went along their own trajectory, mostly evolving in Africa. The line leading eventually to Neanderthals actually went through. a further diversification with around 600,000 years ago, with one line leading to Denisovans, which is another human relative or hominine, I'm going to call them.

750, one line leads to Homo sapiens, the other one's heading towards Neanderthals, but in around 600,000, that line bifurcates again, and we have one line leading to Denisovans, and the other one leading eventually to Neanderthals. Neanderthals, as a species, start to emerge sort of in a mosaic fashion around 430,000 years ago. And so by 350,000, we have what you would call the classic Neanderthal around. So we did share a common ancestor with them way back when, but they're not our direct ancestors, but we are related to them way back in time.

Is it like dog breeds? They were related to each other at some point, but they're very different now. Yeah, absolutely. So we know actually that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens could interbreed. And we know that actually humans, Denisovans, Neanderthals, all getting it on. My friend has a great TEDx talk, my friend Melanie Chang, where she has this slide that says, who's sleeping with whom in the Pleisocene. So there's a lot of exchange of genes happening.

But that doesn't mean that they were the same species. and I don't actually think they were. I think they were close enough, obviously, to be able to interbreed and have fertile offspring, but they're different enough in terms of their genetic makeup, in terms of their physical makeup and so on, that we would think of them as separate species. But as you say, there are different species of dogs,

and they can still interbreed. There are different species of chimpanzees who are also able to breed in captivity. So it's more that the definition of species that we all learned back in high school is not really sensitive enough to the messiness of real biological species. So they're different species even though they are able to interbreed. That makes perfect sense. So why do we think of Neanderthals as being stupid? Because a surprising fact that I read about them is that their brains were bigger than our brains.

Were they daft? Where did that come from? No, I don't think so. So homo sapiens have brain sizes around, we measure them in cubic centimeters, so around 1350 cc's. So that's about three times the size of a chimpanzee brain, which is around 450-ish. Neanderthals have a higher average, and in fact, some of them have reached, I think one of them in particular has reached the size of 1,700 or 1,750 cc's.

So actually larger than ours. But we don't actually know if that means they were smarter in the sense that Neanderthals were similar to us in body structure, but kind of shorter, stockier, heavier boned, that kind of thing. And often people who have bigger bodies, have bigger skulls and bigger brain sizes, but that doesn't mean necessarily that they're more intelligent. At the same time, Neanderthals were doing all. all kinds of things. So they had sophisticated tools. They were making super glue. So like adhesives. And that takes a lot of careful control of heat so that you're not burning the glue, but you're making it, you know, viscous enough and so on. So there's all kinds of things that we know about them. They're making art. They're making jewelry. They're doing all kinds of stuff. So they weren't

stupid by any means. But a lot of research that's happened lately. looking at using 3D reconstructions of the brain architecture, growing mini brains. Actually, they've been doing, growing mini-Neanderthal brains in labs, which kind of freaks me out. Wow. That freaks me out with it. So they've been able to look at how quickly they grow, how many neurons they have, how quickly they make connections and so on and so forth. And there are some interesting differences in that way so that. So that, Modern humans have slower development. They're able to learn from their environment more, but they seem to have more connections between neurons.

So like more complex computing capacity, if I can put it that way. So Neanderthals were smart. They're well adapted. They lived for, you know, over 300,000 years and a whole variety of environments from Gibraltar all the way to Siberia. So they're flexible, adaptable, smart, but they weren't identical to modern humans. I don't even know. I mean, Neanderthals making jewelry and making glue and making art. Like, wow, go you, Neanderthals.

But were the Homo sapiens? Were they at that kind of same level for the research that we've got? Is there anything to suggest that when Neanderthals were making their jewelry, homo sapiens were doing Sudukus and, you know, like well, well advanced? Or were we kind of about the same level of evolution? Is that the word that I want there? Sure. cultural evolution, if you want?

Cultural evolution, yes. Yeah, for sure. So in a time period called the Middle Paleolithic, which is, for our purposes here, around maybe, let's say, around 200,000-ish years ago in the Middle East when you have modern humans and Neanderthals inhabiting this region back and forth, if you had a site with no skeletal remains, if you had just the stone tools, you wouldn't be able to tell whether you had a Neanderthal. Andertal or modern human, because they're making the exact same stone tools in the Middle

Pileolithic, in the Middle East. So places like Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, that kind of place. So at that time, and if you look at the burials associated with each of them, they're roughly similar. Modern humans might have a bit more ochre or some beads, perhaps, like shells, you know, that kind of thing. But it's really, by the time you get to the Upper Paleolithic, right at the very end with the last Neanderthals, where you start to see more and more difference. So the kinds of tools that modern humans are using are even more sophisticated, they're doing more art, more, sort of a lot of the stuff that Neanderthals are doing, but to an even greater extent. And what I find kind of interesting is that it's really these last Neanderthals around 40, 50,000 years ago in

Europe where you start to see more art, more of that personal ornamentation. And, and so on. And so it's always been a really interesting question to me, like, why then? You know, why there, why then? And so my friend Melanie Chang and I have written some papers about that where we think maybe there was some stress on Neanderthals and maybe identifying yourself as part of this kin group and not part of that group might have been more important for getting resources and all sorts of things. So they might have been really kind of pushed to doing all these sorts of relatively new behaviors as they were on their way out. That's fascinating, isn't it? So do we have evidence of, this is going to sound really basic. I'm sorry, could they talk? Could they communicate? Do we know

that they could communicate? Yeah, absolutely. So paleoanthropologists, so people like me, agree virtually on nothing, but one of the only things, which is what makes it fun at conferences. But one of the few things that I think everybody agrees on is that Neanderthals were able to speak, that they had language. And so we know this from looking at the architecture of the brain, at least in a gross sense. We know from being able to reconstruct the throat area of Neanderthals and the base of the skull and so on. You know, so for a whole variety of different ways, we know that they were capable of producing language. We also know from a reconstruction of the middle ear in Neanderthals, they were able to hear the same range of sounds

that Homo sapiens could. And we always forget that language is not just one way. You also have to be able to hear the other person. And then also when we look at the archaeology, it's really clear that the kinds of things are doing, you would need language to do. Whether it was identical to modern humans is the other debate. Some people think, again, from studying their brains that they They may have had more difficulty processing language. Others have said when they would have spoken, they would have had a higher sound or more nasal sound. Actually, if you Google, there's really fabulous sound files of people imitating what they would have sounded like or using a computer to simulate what they would have sounded like, pronouncing different vowels and so on. So you can get lost in that.

So the short answer, which is too late for now, is that, yes, they had language. It might not have been identical, but probably enough communication so that they were able to facilitate communication between themselves and homo sapiens. It's amazing, isn't it, that you can look at those preserved remains and from that workout that they would have had a voice box. This is probably what it would have sounded like. Yeah. Like, it just blows my mind.

If there was a deandthal, like walking around today, just up and about, would they look noticeably different to the point? where people would be like, oh, my God, what is this horrible thing? Or would they, like, how different from humans would they look? Yeah, so I think they would have looked quite a bit different. There are these cartoons where people have drawn pictures of Neanderthals and suggested, you know, if you put a hat on them and they're sitting at the bus stop next to you,

you wouldn't have noticed. I'm thinking, if you wouldn't have noticed, that says more about you than the Neanderthal, because from the neck down, they're kind of shorter and stockier and so on, but from the neck up, they're quite different. They don't really have a chin in the same way that we do. You would notice that. You would notice.

They have foreheads that kind of slope back, so not the nice high forehead that we have. Their face below the nose kind of jutted out more. And they also had on the back of their head sort of a bony protuberance, what we call an occipital bun or to be fancy an occipital chino. And so some people think is that for better visual acuity? Other people think it's a muscle attachment area that help relieve stress on the neck because the way the head kind of slopes back would be putting a lot of stress on the muscle.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And they also have larger noses, like wider nostrils, you know, those kinds of things, enough that you would think... I'm not sitting next to that person on the boat. Yes. I'm like, you know, okay, an osteopithine, you would be even worse, but definitely you would notice the difference with it. I'll be back with April after this short break.

A million dollar question then. Why did Nyanderthals go extinct? Because they seemed to be doing all right at one point. They were on par with the homo sapiens. They were making their beads and they're making their glue. And they've, you know, they're talking and they're doing their things. So what happened to them? Yeah.

So there are as many theories about that as there are paleoanthropologists. I'll say. Ah, so we're back to everyone disagreeing. Okay. Yes, but I will say as briefly as I can, my view, so when you're talking about the extinction of a species, you're basically saying that the reproduction is not exceeding replacement, right? So they're not replacing themselves.

And so for me, my area of specialty is actually the study of Ice Age children. And so I've been really interested in looking at things like infant mortality rates with Neanderthals. A lot of people think, oh, did modern humans hunt them down when modern humans arrived in Europe around 45,000, 48,000 years ago to find Neanderthals there? Did they just hunt them to extinction? No, what we think is that they were already sort of on their way out, that they were living in quite small groups. We can see they're fairly inbred, and that sort of lack of genetic variability can be problematic in all sorts of ways. There was also, you know, big climactic events, you know, big times of intense cold. You know, we just see their numbers are dwindling and dwindling, and they're kind of pushed to the fringes,

like the last Neanderthals are around Gibraltar, for example, where they could survive a little bit longer. And for me, because their numbers are dwindling and they don't have the same kind of social network that we see Homo sapiens did, and yet they're giving birth to these fairly demanding babies. got these large brains, they have a lot of energetic requirements, caloric requirements. And you know, we always say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, if you don't have a village or an extensive social network to draw on, then it becomes harder to make sure your little ones survive to go on and reproduce and so on. And some people did some interesting modeling to show that even a one and a half percent increase in infant mortality means that your population could be

wiped out in 2,000 years. Whoa. Right? So for me, I think that it's like this perfect storm. There is competition with modern humans. There's climactic change. You know, their numbers are dwindling beyond them being able to be viable as a population. And all of this is impacting their ability to keep their little ones alive, you know.

know, I had a professor Philip Tobias, who is a very well-known biological anthropologist, and he said, you know, the message of evolution, I'm not going to do his accent, but the message of evolution is save the children. And I think Neanderthals in the end weren't able to save the children. Do you know what? It's just made me think of Neanderthal vaginas, because, stay with me, stay with me, as one does. Because you were just saying there how big their heads were. And that not only were they big heads, but they had this big bony thing sticking out the back, that cannot have been easy to give birth to. And please disabuse me of this if I've just picked up nonsense reading around this subject.

But human babies, well, they're very difficult to give birth to. We know that, and that infant mortality rates and the rates of the mother can be extraordinarily high. But I think that I'm correct thinking that the reason that we give birth and our babies are, well, they're useless, really. Like when you compare them to others, it's true. Yeah, they can't even hold up their own heads, right? Like, how maladaptive is that? Like, they're crap. They're very cute.

But when you look at, like, gazelles and stuff, like the mothers just, like, thunk, right, we're going now. And that's what they do. Humans are birthed very, very small because of the head. Because they can't keep developing to the point where they can walk straight away because they need to have to give birth to a two-year-old or whatever. So is that anything to do with this about the size of the Neanderthal's heads and that

they would have been very difficult to give birth to? Yeah, it's quite possible. So based on reconstructions of the pelvis and based on the number of Neanderthal infants and a neonate and so on we have, we do think they would have had difficult birth similar to what we have with modern humans as well. And so they would have required help giving birth. And also, you, Yeah, their infants would have been quite helpless in the same way that ours are today. And again, without that sort of social network, it might have been more difficult for them to care for these infants. So that would have definitely, I think, impacted them as well. I was just about to ask you if anyone's reconstructed a Neanderthal vagina from the pelvis.

I don't know if they've actually done that. I wouldn't be surprised. You know, there is a relationship between penis size and vagina size, which, you know, makes sense. And they do estimate that from the pelvis. So it's kind of a gross measure. But we do think that Neanderthal penises and vaginas were roughly the same as ours today. So homo sapien penises and vaginas. No one's reconstructed one to my knowledge, but they may have because new studies come out every week.

people have reconstructed Neanderthal noses from cadaver noses. It's research waiting to be done. Exactly. But there was interbreeding, wasn't there? Between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, that's fascinating. How do you know that that happened? And what do you speculate was going on? I mean, apart from sex, they were having sex, but was there a lot of interbreeding going on?

Yeah, actually, there was. So now that we've been able to reconstruct the, Neanderthal genome, which, you know, if you'd said to me 25, 30 years ago, I would have said, no way. But since we've been able to sequence the Neanderthal genome, we've been able to pick up lots of evidence of interbreeding. And of course, comparing it with our own genome. We're able to see contributions of Neanderthal DNA to us and also the reverse. So it looks like there was a lot of instances of interbreeding going back at least about 200,000 years ago. So lots of different Neanderthal populations have contributed to Homo sapien DNA.

So it looks like in areas where they overlap, so again, in the Middle East, probably is some of the oldest evidence of overlap between these two species and the oldest evidence of interbreeding between them. That means that they were enough similar that they were able to see each other as viable mates, if I can put it that way. I see, that opens up the question then, doesn't it, of like, having sex is one thing, but were they in relationships, were their marriages, were Neanderthals and Homo sapiens living in the same communities as one another? I suppose these are the kind of things that we're not going to get answers to,

but what are your thoughts on that? Would there have been integrated communities of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens? See, for me, that's one of the most interesting questions, because we do have so much evidence of interbreeding and we do have hybrid kids. So kids who have mixed parentage and they obviously survived. You know, there was obviously enough of a bond between the mom and that hybrid kid to be loved, to be cared for. They must have been able to communicate and to have been accepted by the larger group. So obviously there's a lot of affection and emotion there.

But what I find so interesting is that we have yet to find any communities where we have Neanderthals and modern humans living together. Really? Yeah. So we have Neanderthal groups. We have modern human groups. We have them using the same sites at different times, but, you know, separated by a considerable amount of time. But nonetheless, so I don't know if it's just we haven't found those yet. Or if they were okay for a. one-night stand. God. But you weren't bringing them home to the family. Oh, that's totally what Homo sapiens did. We can be nasty as a species. So there's never been, we've never excavated a site where homo sapiens and Neanderthals

were coexisting. There's never been a shed burial that's been excavated. There's nothing that suggests that they were living together, though we know that they had sex. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, maybe. that'll come. Maybe we'll find something like that. But at the moment, we don't have anything like that. That would be, you know, the find of the century. And so for me, that's so interesting

whenever I think about these relationships. Homersapians are like the fuck boy of the human species. Yeah. We're just, we never call them back. That's right. Just completely ghosted. We've ghosted them completely. Never introduced them to our friends. And it might have been, the other way around, it might have been who's that scrawny boy that you're hanging out with. In some of your research, you've shown actually that Neanderthal women matured, was it faster than the men? That the Neanderthal cougar is a thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's sort of typical.

I mean, when we think of even us today, homo sapiens today, girls mature more quickly. And there's really interesting reasons for this. So girls tend to look more mature and act more mature before they're fertile, which is so they start menstruating and so on. But they have this period of a year or two where they're not fertile. And we think that that's because it gives their bodies time, like their pelvic regions and so on time to keep maturing. And also gives them the opportunities to create strong social relationships and to learn about infant care and all those sorts of things. whereas boys are kind of the opposite. They are fertile before they look at.

They mature more slowly. And that seems to be, according to some researchers anyways, that boys aren't seen as competitors to other males. So, you know, they retain that kind of boy-like look for a longer time and they can learn about hunting or all the different things that they need to learn about without posing a threat in any way. And so we think it's similar.

with Neanderthals as well, again, from looking at the skeleton and growth and development and that kind of thing that girls are retiring more quickly. But we think that both boys and girls are hitting puberty faster and going through it faster than what we see with Homo sapiens. And a lot of that has to do with, we think, if there's high mortality of prime adults and adolescents, then there's kind of a selection for, a push for hitting puberty sooner, being able to reproduce sooner, and that kind of thing. What all this that I'm hearing about Neanderthal penises being spiky? Oh, no, it's the opposite, actually. Thank goodness.

So some species, including chimpanzees, have these little penal spines on them, and it tends to be something that we associate with more promiscuous species, so ones that have lots of partners. And so if you can picture this, so these little spines are made out of the same material, basically, as your skin and hair and that kind of thing, when the penis is inserted into the vagina, it acts sort of like a scrub brush. Can I put it that way? You can possibly remove some of the sperm there from the pre-examble.

from the previous encounter, it might clean that out, you know, competing sperm, exactly. We'd clean that out like a scrub brush and a bottle, if I could put it that way. And so also people suggested that it also chafes the area a little bit, just gently. And so it might make the female not want to have sex again right away. So it gives that sperm time to get where it needs to get, so to speak, before she goes and has another encounter. counter. And so what we see, though, is that when we look at the Neanderthal genome, they don't have the genes coding for those spines. So what we think is 770,000 years ago or 800,000 years ago, when we had that last common ancestor, that that common ancestor didn't have those spines either.

So humans, Denisovans, and Neanderthals have a smooth penis. And that suggests that they might have been more monogamous. They're not competing in the same way. the more promiscuous species are. Didn't you say earlier that there's a lot of evidence of inbreeding amongst neanderthals? How do you know that? Yeah. Well, the inbreeding is we can look at the genetics of the different individuals and we see that there's very low diversity.

So it shows that they're a very limited number of breeding partners. And also we've been able to see, again, genetically looking at the relatedness of some of these neanderthals and we can see they're very closely related. Is that probably because the numbers are dwindling and that there's just sort of fewer options available to them? Exactly. So they're living in small groups. You've got maybe eight to 20 adults. I mean, and 20, I think to me, would be like the largest number.

And they're so spread out. Yeah, it's really small. And just imagine something happens. There's some kind of catastrophe, an earthquake, a flood. Something goes wrong when they're hunting a mammoth, for example. And you can lose, a number of your adults really quickly. So the age and sex distribution in that group can be changed literally overnight.

And people were often probably losing their reproductive partners. And if these groups are fairly spread out over the landscape, which is what we think, they would have had to travel long distances to be able to meet another Neanderthal. So, you know, the other options are to breed with homo sapiens if they're around. Skinny ones. Skinny ones, just don't bring him home. Don't bring that boy home. And we're to choose younger partners or to choose more closely related partners because that's all

there is. This has been so fascinating. I've absolutely loved every second of this. If there have been inbreeding, although no evidence of relationships, but they're definitely into sex going on here, what do we get from them? Is there anything that we have inherited, if that had never, happened if both parties had just shunned one another, human beings would not be walking around with certain traits to this very day? Yeah. Well, one of the most important, I think,

is the fact that Neanderthals may have boosted our immune system in some cases. So, for example, it's probably our Neanderthal DNA that helps us to clear retroviruses, RNA viruses. Oh, thanks, Neanderthals. Although not quite as much thanks. Did they, give us depression? Yeah, some people think that there is some evidence of things like that, like depression and maybe some autoimmune diseases and studies that are still ongoing, but the more we look into it, the more we see that there were pluses and minuses of this relationship. Good and bad things going on. Exactly. I mean, and in the reverse, humans seem to have given Neanderthals herpes simplex too, the kind that causes genital herpes.

No wonder they were depressed. Absolutely. And then in return, Neanderthals may have given us some of the most deadly versions of the HPV virus. So sexually transmitted diseases were going back and forth. And a lot of these, based on how we know the viruses are spread, would have had to have been spread multiple times between these groups. So, yeah. You've been so much fun to talk to. If people want to know more about you and your research, and they definitely should, where can they find you?

So I'm a professor at the University of Victoria, so people can take a look on our website in the Department of Anthropology, and you can find all the things that I'm up to and links to my book. Can I do a little plug for my book? Growing up in the Ice Age, and it's everything we know about kids throughout human evolution. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today. You have been wonderful. Thank you so much for information. fighting me. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to April for joining me. How good was she?

And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you'd just fancy dropping by to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from medieval sex to the real Charles Dickens with Miriam Margulies, all coming your way. The podcast was edited. by Tom Delaghy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets,

The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.