Dan Snow's History Hit - The Neanderthals

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

Rebecca Wragg Sykes joined me on the pod to discuss our perception of the Neanderthals, which has undergone a metamorphosis since their discovery 150 years ago, from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're going way back. We're going way back in this episode. You know I sometimes like to do a bit of prehistory. We're going way back to the Neanderthals. They're in all of us. It turns out, the latest thinking, that the science has changed extraordinarily over the last 20 years. It's super exciting. We no longer think Neanderthals were a genetic cul-de-sac, an evolutionary cul-de-sac, but their traces of them lives in all of us. I love this. If you want to go and listen to all the back episodes of this podcast, we go all the way from the Stone Age right up until the nuclear,

the digital age, yeah, fact. If we do all of that, we cover it all on History Hit. So if you want to do that, if you want to binge listen to these long summer days, please do so at historyhit.tv. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get one month for free, and then you get a month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. But this episode is with Rebecca Ragsykes. She's just written a fabulous book about Neanderthals.

I'm enjoying it so much. It's my holiday reading. I'm enjoying it so much at the moment. Kindred, you've got to go and check it out. Transforming the way that we think about our own humanity. Not book you read does that um so rebecca ragsyke's fantastic book fantastic interviewee here it is enjoy rebecca thank you very much for coming on the podcast oh well thank you so much for inviting me this is really great um i am a huge fan of neanderthals um and and they're kind of and the fact that we're we're um we're kind of reviving

them you know that when i was growing up neanderthal i was it was actually a derog it was a pejorative right people used it to say this person's idiot but we now your description of them is is just presents the the picture of a hugely sophisticated... How do we describe them? Species? Oh, well, that's a can of worms in the first instance. But species has different definitions. Primarily, can two organisms breed and produce viable offspring? Then they are kind of the same species but

within um zoology there is a there's a concept that's kind of useful which is allotaxa um which is where you would apply to things like the fact that a yak can make babies with a cow so they're different species but they're very closely related so i think that's more how we should be thinking about um about us and neanderthals, because we've not been separated from them that long, somewhere around 700,000 years ago. Our branch split off from the branch that was leading to them. And that's not far off the same period in time that the chimpanzees split from the bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees, as they're sometimes called. So they look very different and they are behaviorally different so that's that's a good comparison okay so 700,000 years

ago what's going on who is where and what are we that's a really tricky one um 700,000 years ago neanderthals are not really neanderthals yet um that's before them our paths are still the same at that point yeah so we are um we're a homo we're from the homo branch um in terms of uh deeper hominin evolution and so if you go back to say like three million years ago you have small creatures um that are still relatively ap in some ways they don't have very large brains but they are fully bipedal and they are making stone tools lithics and the oldest record that we have now for that in Africa is 3.3 million years with essentially quite simple napping it's using stone anvil you kind of just hit it on the anvil so it's not really napping

that you would think of as somebody sitting there and making an axe and as you go through time about two million years ago you get things that are starting to look a bit more like us early homo species and by about 1.8 to 1.5 million years agorica and you have the emergence of homo ergaster which is the name that we now use for what everybody used to call homo erectus um essentially very human like in in body um the the brain is not so big there are differences but they are fully upright they're quite tall actually um and they're definitely living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. We have footprint sites from around a lake where we can basically see them stalking animals around a lake. It's amazing.

So that's already one and a half million years ago, well before the Neanderthals. So if you sort of zoom forward, we don't quite know where the split between us and the branch that was going to lead to Neanderthals happened, but on the balance, it's probably going to be in Africa. And the split leading to us, you shouldn't kind of think of it necessarily as like just a branch, like a straight path. path um what we see from from the archaeology uh not so much the archaeology but the anatomy and the genetics is really suggesting that our own lineage evolved uh almost as like a meta population um different uh subpopulations across the continent in af Africa almost show sort of a mosaic of features, anatomy, and it

looks like there probably was far more contact and interbreeding between those, and that coalesced over time into what looks like us in Africa about, between about 300 and 150,000 years ago, so that's quite late really, it took us all that time to become something that really looks like you and me. And if we then look at what was going on with Neanderthals, the branch that was going to lead to them, we would call them Neanderthalsovans, because that branch then split not too long after, probably about 600,000 years one sort of population is turning into the Neanderthals in Europe probably the other branch is going to become the Denisovans and this other kind of hominin that has only really recently been identified initially purely

from genetics and which is amazing in itself that we can sort of pick out this ghost hominin that we knew nothing about and they were an Asian species by the look of it. We know very little about them we've got just a handful of fossils and we don't really understand exactly where they fit archaeologically in terms of their culture but the Neanderthals certainly, what we might call proto-Neanderthals, are appearing in Europe by around 430,000 years ago. And we have really great fossil evidence for that from Spain. And sort of if you fast forward it 100, 000 years onwards to about 350 000 years ago still sounds like a hugely long time but on that massive scale back to three million years it's very recent um that is when neanderthals proper emerged um and what we would really recognize in terms of their anatomy and also um their culture the middle Paleolithic is what we call that.

And their way of life is, by that point, quite clearly established top hunters already experimenting with different materials for using tools and things like this. So that's really the point at which they've arrived, if you want to put it that way. So you've got, we still call them Homo sapiens? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're Homo sapiens. I would call people who are around at the same time as Neanderthals,

I would call them early Homo sapiens, basically, just to differentiate from us. Yeah, early versions of us. Then you've also got some Denisovans knocking about potentially as well. In Asia, yeah. And so you have got different, like very closely rated human uh hominid species okay uh so obviously first question is neanderthals and humans were

able to breed were they yes we know we first found that out for sure a decade ago there was a long long long debate sort of beginning in the the 90 really and moving onwards that there were two models. One was that hominins in general were quite widespread across the old world early, you know, from a million plus. They were outside Africa. There was an idea that there was always interconnectedness between different populations across the old world in a slow, organic kind of way. But the proposal was that there was some gene flow

and that within different regions, different hominins emerged, but also interacted. And then against that was a different view that homo sapiens emerged only in Africa and then dispersed out of Africa this was the out of Africa theory and essentially replaced the existing archaic hominin species that were all around the rest of the old world and that was it but there was no like interbreeding it was just swept away basically um and the first genetic material that was found was from the mitochondrial genome which is like the the powerhouse cells in your body um that seemed to support that because there was basically no no sense that neanderthals had contributed anything to our mt dna the problem is that mt dna is only from maternal lines and so

it's not going to tell the whole picture so it was only 10 years ago that we first got our first real look at a nuclear genome. They were not as complete and as high resolution as we can get now with good fossils but it showed definitely that there was a signal suggesting that people outside sub-Saharan Africa were more similar to Neanderthals than people in that region which was definitely a really strong hint that there had been some interbreeding and since then it's just gone you know crazy that there is so much more evidence now and I think that's something that's really hard for people to keep track of um i think most people most people know oh we interbred with them didn't we you know but um but the amount of different um kinds of evidence for that and the picture that we now have that there were probably multiple phases of contact and interbreeding

potentially going back before 200 000 years ago maybe before 270,000 years ago, that's a big change. So it looks like there were earlier dispersals of early Homo sapiens and people essentially looking pretty much like us out from Africa into at least Asia, the Near East, through the Near East and across into Asia. And based on fossil evidence, it now looks as if people were in China by at least between 80,000, perhaps as much as 120,000 years ago. thousand years ago um we have uh good evidence based on the archaeology and genetics from australia that aboriginal people's history goes back 65 000 years ago you know and they had to get there so um so that's pushing that back that matches this asian chronology and then we also have from the near east um in israel we have a site now which looks as if the fossil is looking pretty much like common sapiens, and that's 180,000 years ago. So that dispersal of when people began to move outside Africa has been pushed way back in time,

which means that the scope of when we could have been interacting with Neanderthals has massively widened. And that's exactly what we see from the genetics it is pointing from multiple different samples suggesting that there were different periods during which these populations were meeting and probably in very different social settings there was interaction and breeding hybrid babies. So as a Western European, I am more likely to have neothelial DNA, right, than someone, a Tasmanian? No, that's what people used to think

because people used to see Europe as the Neanderthal's heartland. But really, they are a Eurasian species. If you look geographically, if you plot all their sites out and look geographically at the spread, there's actually more into Asia than in Europe. So they were always a Eurasian species. And what seems to have happened, although genetics is extremely fast moving,

every sample we get has the potential to really change the picture because we have so few at the moment um so we have to bear that in mind that things can can shift somewhat but at the moment it looks like um we were probably uh moving dispersing out of africa but we didn't get anywhere near europe for a long time um we may have been sort of around the edges in the Near East in Israel but um it looks as if the populations um that dispersed from Africa that went across into Asia did encounter Neanderthals and living people from East Asia um as well as other regions and Oceania so Papuans they have more

Neanderthal in their genome than Western Europeans and that's partly because Western Europeans are not an ancestral population that have been in Europe for all this time they are Neolithic peoples for the most part so when you're talking about Ice Age

humans, Homo sapiens people hunting in in europe and the upper paleolithic who made the cave art that's not the ancestors of most living western europeans those populations also were replaced successively through later prehistory and so that's something that's often a surprise we like to say oh we're a success you know we we're still here in Neanderthals aren't but those early populations that we see in Europe those early hunter-gatherers they're not really much to do with the present-day European population those people came from the Near East so that's why you have lower amounts in Western Europeans than in East Asians of Neanderal dna but the other interesting thing

is that although potentially somewhere up to 20 to 50 percent of the whole neanderthal genome might be preserved in living people it's not all the same bits in different groups and that's probably because all these different phases of when people were encountering each other different material you know it went over or rather it would take the the diversity of the existing populations that were interacted with but then what was kept in us varied um so it looks like um genes to do with immunity were definitely something that was important for us and that's kept but not everything is the same across living people as to what you've actually got okay so we are talking too much about

homo sapiens and we're so focused on ourselves we're here to talk about neanderthals so let okay so let's just ignore the homo sapiens so when you do get a a group of neanderthals pre-contact with proto homo sapiens what tell me what how do they live what do we know about them how are they how are they different to what we would become well we know an awful lot now um it's 160 odd years since we first discovered neanderthals or rediscovered them um in the mid-19th century and the the change in in what the pioneer pre-historians had to deal with in terms of the material they could use in their methods of analysis is enormous. So, you know, I think their jaws would really drop at what 21st century archaeologists can actually do. And, you know, we can look from stone tool assemblages to the kinds of animals they ate.

But we can go right down to you know micro scale analysis we can look at the grot in the calculus on Neanderthal teeth to see what they ate we can actually see like traces of smoke in their dental calculus and we can examine the micro structure of an individual hearth to assess how many phases of burning it had whether the temperatures of burning were different and you might want to know that because that can tell you things about how that site was used did people did Neanderthals reuse that hearth in one place did they use it for different things which tells you a lot about how organized their lives were so these we kind of have to have to tack between different scales of our data and they'll tell us different things but we can then stitch that together into an into a narrative of their lives but it's still completely grounded in the archaeology and

that's that's exactly what i've tried to do in the book so tell me okay so what's the night out with neanderthals like i mean we are they reusing that hearth? Are they moving all the time? What are they eating? The impression we get really is that for almost all of their period of existence compared to early Homo sapiens of the same time, contemporaries, they were living pretty similar lives. People were in small groups, Neanderthals. lives and people were in small groups Neanderthals it looks like there were never large sort of agglomerations of people they were not staying for months and months at a time in a single site in a cave or a rock shelter they were

highly mobile but that doesn't mean that they were disorganized or unsystematic the impression that we get is that they they knew the land intimately they knew the places to be at the right time so they would we have evidence from some places that um there are they are at sites and they are targeting particular animals at different times of the year different seasons and so there's sites in spain where it looks like they're hunting the deer all year round and we can tell that because of the wear on the animal's teeth varies depending on the kind of diet it has through the year and the deer look like they were there all the time

whereas the horse all look like they were taken during a short period of time not necessarily all the horses in that site were killed in one particular season like of one year but it's a seasonal signature so there is structure and then if you transpose that to look at the what they're doing within the space of a site again that picture's really changed that for a long time people sort of presented Neanderthals as not really much more organized than hyenas in their dens, you know, coming in, eating some food, making a fire and sort of just trashing everything and leaving. But when we use really high resolution analysis with good sites where the preservation is very good, we can definitely see clear patterning in how they were using their space.

And so you have the hearths. I mean, hearths are obviously a center of activity and we know that we build our houses around the hearth still but we can literally see you know the the halo of artifacts around hearths where they were sitting and organizing their their daily work around the fire and there are different hearths at the back of the cave that look like they were burning differently smouldering probably those are sleeping hearths to warm them and because they're going to sleep at the back of the cave with your back to the to the rock because there's a lot of nasty beasts around um and we can also see in in several sites really good evidence now for um middens so active management of waste you know rubbish piles basically and we

know that uh by looking at the at the structuring so like the layering within those middens we can see evidence for burning of um plant materials which was probably bedding and we can see layers of uh charcoal and ash from where they've raked out their hearths to like freshen them up and then dumped that as well and so there's clear evidence that they were living in a way that would not look unfamiliar you know if you sort of are suddenly transported back it would look like people you know just getting on doing the stuff around the the fire there's a little rubbish dump there's a sleeping bit. And then we can see really cool stuff in some places.

There's evidence for animal processing. So they are hunting out in the landscape. They have kill sites. Quite often at the kill sites, depending on the size and the species of the animals, they will be selective about what they butchered, how much they carried away. And then you have sometimes secondary processing sites where they bring jointed stuff in, cut it up more, smash up the bones, get the marrow out. Because we have to remember that they were really interested in fat and marrow, not just lean meat.

And then that stuff sometimes then gets taken on further or it goes direct from the kill site to caves and rock shelters. And we can see once it arrives in some places, there is appears to be processing of different parts of animals in different parts of the site. So that may be to do with the number of people staying there at any one time. there at any one time and the kind of makeup of the group might change how they did their butchery for example whether they separated a whole carcass and different perhaps sub-families within a group got a different part um but the impression we get clearly is that um you know they were not i guess sort of scrabbling around at a kill and everyone just grabbing what they could get and it was you know chaotic it was always systematic and their butchery they knew exactly how to take apart an animal and they knew the best bits to take back with them and the impression really is of sharing of that resource

amongst the group and so I think that's something that's that really has wider resonances for how we see their society as a whole. has wider resonances for how we see their society as a whole. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series

Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Just take one brief moment to pause and say how unbelievably cool it is that you can reconstruct that journey from a hunt to a kill

to a butchery process to a night sleeping at 300,000 years. I mean, sorry, 200,000 years. I mean, I'm just like, it's astonishing. A lot of those sites with really good condition are later. They're like 100,000 or a bit later. But you do still have really, really nice, nicely preserved early sites. One that's really famous is Schöen in germany which is a horse hunting site where neanderthals went back repeatedly potentially over decades maybe centuries to this lake shore and they hunted horses probably ambushing them and they have um they were using spears we know that because the spears are there and these amazingly finely crafted um spruce and

pine spears probably throwing because they are they appear to be weighted like javelins are um and that site is 330 000 years old unbelievable um can can i so so why i mean are they any they sound um i don't want to make any great claims for our species but they sound as sophisticated as homo sapiens are they i mean like is there any difference really in in the sites there is um what seems to be intriguing is that the early homo sapiens coming into europe say 180 000 we don't know that much about um about them we have their fossils but we haven't really sort of got a handle on exactly what archaeology and things they were producing. But if you look, say, from about 40,000 years ago, which is the last dispersal probably of our species into Europe, and that was where we had the last encounters with Neanderthals.

What people are doing at that point really does not look that different to Neanderthals. They are pretty much hunting the same animals. There are some isotopic studies which can really show you where they are in the trophic level, so which predators they resemble in terms of what they're eating. And it looks like Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, certainly in northwest Europe when it was quite cold around 40,000 years ago, were eating a lot of mammoth. Their diet is basically the same.

There's been a long period where people were proposing maybe we had a more broad diet or we were more specialised in mammoth and things. And it doesn't look like that's necessarily true. in mammoths and things and um it doesn't look like that's necessarily true i think neanderthals you can think of neanderthals as focused on quality so wherever they were and we have to remember they lived in interglacial periods as well when it was as warm as today and even warmer what was around them they took the best of what was in their environment so in the in the southern europe in the mediterranean we do see them um not hunting things like mammoths and stuff because they're not really there so much but you have red deer small game rabbits birds tortoises and so this broad

spectrum diet that was once claimed to be something that made us really successful they are doing it in some places so the diet and the hunting side is not really a difference. But in terms of what seems to become more clear over time, after the Neanderthals have gone, we can see what we began to develop into. And it's certainly true that it seems that we had more extensive and more connected social networks than Neanderthals did. So not all Neanderthals, you know, just lived in one valley and were really inbred. There's definitely evidence that in some regions, populations were extremely small and there was inbreeding, but not in all contexts for Neanderthals so there's diversity

there however none of the early Homo sapiens genetic samples we have so far we don't have that many but none of them show any kind of signature for you know tiny breeding populations or inbreeding so there's definitely something different going on in how um how the society of early hominids people were structured because they were they were living in tiny numbers as well it's not like there were loads more of them but clearly they were more interconnected um in order to show a greater genetic diversity even if you have a tiny population you will you have to be in contact and we have to be meeting more people um so probably that is um why we later see sort of 10 000 years old later we see you know the construction of large mammoth huts um during this later uh period of the last ice age and but i think that tendency

was there earlier we just don't see it in the archaeological record but we can see it genetically and so that's that's definitely there and we can also see in the way that the early Homo sapiens people seem to have transported or moved around their lithics further and their sewn tools so when you want to assess the scale of a social network, you can look at the isotopes in your body or Neanderthals body, which will record geologically the place where you grew up and you were born. It gets basically sort of laid down in your teeth and bones compared to where those bones are found. And you compare the difference. And we can't do that for all samples because we don't have many fossil samples and you're not allowed to just drill through all of them. So the other thing you can do is look at the scale at which you see stone tools moving across the landscape from the source to where they end up, where you find them.

And those distances are lengthier and there are more of the longer distance transfers for early Homo sapiens than for Neanderthals. So Neanderthals did sometimes move their tools a long way, say over 100 kilometres, up to 300 kilometres. And that's showing, that's just a snapshot of a particular territory because we're not going to see it from beginning to end. It's just a snapshot of where those individuals were moving around. But we kind of we hype it up basically and the same thing this hyping up is what we see with the symbolic evidence too

so Neanderthals were I would call them aesthetically engaged with materials so that's they're they're making marks structured on bones, we have evidence for that, they're interested in pigments, they're interested in mixing substances to make different pigment mixes, they're interested in material transformation, so we can see that they knew how to turn birch bark into birch tar to halve their tools together, you have to cook that and sort of it's not easy it's not it's not incredibly difficult but it's it's not you know something that really happens by accident you have to manage that process and now we have new evidence that they were combining pine resin with beeswax to make glue for the tools as well so that's that's a mixing thing

they're doing with pigments as well they're interested in fossils and there's a mixing thing. They're doing it with pigments as well. They're interested in fossils. There's a fossil shell from a site in Italy called Grotta Fumane. And this is a shell that was probably carried 100 kilometers from where it was picked up. And it has red pigment on the outside. And so it's only one thing. This is the only thing like that from the whole record. But it's like it's a little keyhole into what was going on but when you look at what homo sapiens were doing it's amplified you know the amount of pigment use is much more the markings on other materials like bone they become more structured

more clearly designed graphically yeah so the diversity of of what what was happening aesthetically um is greater and it also looks more structured in terms of potential symbolic content so that's what i would say is the real difference so humans are sapiens we're artists and we hang about in gangs and we travel is that what is that what gave us that advantage over of an ender final question where did the enderthals go were they were they absorbed into us were they murdered were they starved what happened to them well they haven't gone anywhere because they're still they're still here in genetic terms there's probably more of them still here than walked the earth although in bodily form but why do we not look like neanderthals

basically is the question why you know why have they disappeared as a fossil? You know, why did the fossil disappear? Why did their culture disappear? I think really after, you know, more than 100 years of people debating this, there is very little evidence for direct conflict. for direct conflict um we don't see greater levels of aggression or you know interpersonal violence in Neanderthals compared to early Homo sapiens they don't look like they were up for a fight any more than we were um and I think also the assumption that contact would necessarily be something that has an aggressive default position. I think that's also

open to debate because of what we see about Neanderthal society more broadly. If you look at the primate models for example, chimpanzees are quite aggressive to other groups and they actually patrol their territories if they see another group and the numbers look in their favor they'll have a go and they'll try and kill them bonobos are different they don't do that no they don't do that they're much more open to interaction and there's no reason from the archaeology why we should favor the chimp model and if we look at what neanderthals are doing they are groups that are founded around sharing of resources within their own group and that's that's one of the explanations for the reason why bonobos are not hyper aggressive like chimps because there's less food competition and they're

not fighting over resources so much so females for example in chimpanzee society don't really have like strong friendships it's it's all about competition and they go away and hide to have their baby because there's infanticide is a huge risk bonobos is not like that they have friendships they they actually you know bonobo females will try and assist during birth, will try and support. And it's just so much less aggressive. So I don't see any evidence that suggests that Neanderthals are more like bonobos is not a realistic possibility, which means that. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. new episode every week. In situations where different, very different groups are meeting us and them, there's not necessarily a reason why it should have been a fight. It doesn't mean to say that there wasn't conflict. I'm sure there was, because we have to remember we're not talking about one time or one place where this happened we're talking multiple periods across more than a hundred thousand years so that every context would be different

but we should also remember that hybrid babies in order to survive they need to be looked after they need to be able to adapt to whichever cultural group they're raised in and grow up find a partner and have their own babies if that didn't happen we wouldn't see the dna signal in us you know and that speaks to at least some level of cultural compatibility you know social compatibility cognitive compatibility even if it's not identical. So I think that's another interesting perspective. But in terms of why they disappear, we're not looking at a full assimilation. You know, they're not like the Borg. We didn't totally assimilate Neanderthals because the genetics doesn't show that it's smaller scale but it might just come

down to slow processes where it was already a difficult time Neanderthals had lived through harsh glacial periods before they'd coped with that they had coped with great instability as well but it may be that the last dispersal of us coming and sort of pushing at the boundaries of Europe and their area beginning to shrink coincided with this climatic period that we know was extremely, you know, up and down and up and down. And you could have very different conditions just within a person's lifetime, even on shorter scales. So if you're a hunter-gatherer you really do not want instability that's a big problem and so that may have made a setting where people were competing for resources and if one group perhaps us was just a little bit more successful every year and had more babies over a thousand years that's going to have a big impact climate change man volcanoes um uh so last

last question very quick where was the last where was the last neanderthal and where do they live and when was it nobody knows and what we see is that pretty much everywhere they're gone by about 40 000 years ago and some of the very the the dates that seem more recent than that sort of 28 000 30 000 34 000 as we use better techniques they've been pushed older as we as we've sort of honed our dating that has been pushing it back more towards 40 000 so i would say just on you know geography it's probably somewhere in western europe but we shouldn't forget that they were in Asia as well. So the last Neanderthal could have been somewhere off in Siberia, perhaps even further east. We don't know what their eastwards extent was. So yeah, we should keep our minds open. Neanderthals like to surprise us.

One day we'll find one in Minnesota. Fingers crossed. Thank you. That would be a cat among the old pigeons. Anyway, thank you very much. What's the book called? It's called Kindred, Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Brilliant. Thank you. That was so cool. Thank you very much. Thank you. hi everyone it's me Dan Snow just a quick request it's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this but now I'm doing it I hate myself please please go on to iTunes wherever you get your podcasts and give us five star rating and review it it really helps basically boosts up the chart

which is good and then more people listen which is nice so if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favor. Thanks. you