Stuff You Should Know - Selects: What Happened to the Neanderthals?

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

As recently as 40,000 years ago we lived among humans from an entirely different species – Neanderthals. About the same time our species showed up, Neanderthals suddenly vanished. Just what happened to the other guys? Did our ancestors do something … bad? Find out in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca. Hi friends, this is Josh and for this week's Select, I chose our episode on Neanderthals,

mayhaps the most misunderstood hominin of all time. We long tended to think of Neanderthals as loping dummies, but recent research questions that view and Chuck and I swoop in to defend them with all our might. Leave the Neanderthals alone! Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Should Nizzo.

I'm excited about this one. This just feels like classic Josh and Chuck. I think so too. Tuk Tuk's going to make an appearance, Tuk Tuk might make sweet love, which is always fun. Sure. Watching Tuk Tuk? Yeah.

We like to watch. He's surprisingly tender. He is. I'm sorry to all the third graders, or actually more to the point the third grade teachers who are standing there right now at the head of class. They're like, oh, what happened to the Neanderthals? It's perfect for the classroom. So yeah, this is very, I thought this is very cool.

I love this. I've talked a little bit about Neanderthals in the past and Homo sapiens and Dennis Snowvans. That's right, right? There's an extra N in there, I think. Dennis Sovans. Yeah. Dennis Snowvans sounds like a dude. Like he manages an ice cream factory.

Right, Snowvans. Dennis Snowvans. Yeah. This is good stuff though. So let's treat everyone. All right. We'll do our best. Now you put the pressure on.

So Neanderthals, it really, so the correct pronunciation is tall, by the way. Yeah. I had a teacher point that out. I remember very specifically in the ninth grade. Right. But when you're being correct, you're actually speaking in old German, not even modern German. So it's really just a question of how you want to say it. Either one's acceptable.

No. I mean, the pronunciation would still be that in modern German. Neanderthal. Yeah. Okay. Because I saw it spelled T-A-L too. Oh really? Yeah.

Yeah. Let's get rid of that H. Okay. I kind of like it. I like how it looks, but I think it's up to the individual to say tall or tall. Okay. But the correct way is Neanderthal. Right.

Okay. And Neanderthals, I'm probably going to just switch back and forth if that's okay with everybody. That is our way. Not to make a big deal out of it or anything, but Neanderthals or Thals, depending on who you are, they were a species of human beings, of humans. If you think about it, Chuck, you, Jerry, me, everybody out there. Sometimes Noel.

Yeah. Same species. Yeah. One species of human. That's it. Like you just don't really kind of think about that. But if you dial back a little bit, if we got on the way back machine and went back just like 40,000 years, there'd be at least one other species of human running around on earth.

They would be the Neanderthals, Thals. So we didn't even know that there was another such thing as another human species until the 1850s. Because there was a 40,000 year gap separating us and then. That's right. So the very first fossils of a Neanderthal was found in 1829 in Belgium and then again in Gibraltar in 1848. But they kind of were just like, oh cool, look at these old bones.

Yeah. Wasn't a big deal. Watch how easy they snap on my knees. Right. They didn't know what they were. No. And then in 1956 in Germany, something pretty significant happened. They found some pretty substantial fossils.

I think a whole skeleton actually. Yeah. Well, they definitely found a whole skull. This was in four or five feet of clay in a limestone quarry cave in a site called Felthofer. I'm so glad. And this is in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf. This is where it all comes around. If you hear the word Neanderthal or tall, T-H-A-L in old German means valley.

And so the scientific name Homo neander talensis means humans from the Neander valley. Yes. Because that's all it means. That's where the first one that we realized, wait a minute, this isn't a cave bear. This isn't like some dead person. This is a different species of human. Yeah. They saw that what we now know is classic Neanderthal oval shape, that big, thick, low, receding

forehead and brow, very thick bones that was brought to the quarry foreman. And he said, it's a cave bear. I guess he even came over from Alabama. But he said, but I do know a teacher and a guy who's really into fossils. His name's Johann Karl Vollrott. And here, you can have these bones. He got them, did some impressions, did some castings of these and sent those to Hermann Schaufhausen, a professor, I don't know why German is so funny to you.

I don't either, but coming out of your mouth, it's like, it's just hilarious. After all these years. He was a professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, and they both were like, hey, this is significant because this ain't no homo sapien, but it's a human. We think. Right. It's some other kind of human, some other kind of hominid that we just didn't understand before.

That's right. So they presented their findings to the world. They said, look at this, everybody, get a load of this. And there is an immediate problem with Neanderthals. So this was 1857 when they presented their findings, and that was before on the origin of the species. So before Darwin, it was like God created all this. God created you.

God created the panther. God created the monkey separately. Like all of this stuff was all separate. Right. And then Darwin came along and said, no, all this stuff is actually related. And if you trace everything far enough back, you're going to find a last common ancestor between two things that don't look anything alike, including humans and apes. And so this was before that, so it didn't fit into the Christian creation story.

But then even after Darwin came along, it just so happened that Neanderthals were discovered and analyzed, and it was realized that they were a different species of human at a time when biological anthropology was around. Yeah, phrenology. And we've talked about it on the show a little bit. The very sort of racist practice of categorizing humans in their inferiority of races by the shapes of their skull. Right.

Look at this skull. Well, it's not basically Western and European shaped, we think. It has some weird ridge, so they're an inferior race. They extended all that onto Neanderthals because if you think, if you're comparing like human Homo sapiens skulls to one another, and somehow finding inferiority or superiority in the shapes of those, when you compare a Neanderthal skull to a human skull, clearly the human skull is much more refined and developed, Neanderthals must have been these dim-witted brutes. The caveman, like the whole reason we think of the caveman and Neanderthals as big dummies

and oafs is because they were discovered during a time of racist science. Yeah, and that was the view that was held and it's still held by some people who don't know better. This is one reason why we're doing this episode, but it was held for a couple of hundred years. But in the recent decades, things have changed. Our picture of the Neanderthal has changed because of science and research. And we now know that, well, a lot of cool things. I don't want to spoil it yet.

Okay, yeah, I was wondering if that was too much of the beans getting out. I think so. Okay. Let's tease that out. That's fine with me. So we'll just sit here quietly for a second as we go past this. Okay. All right.

We ready? Yeah. All right. So the current story, like the simple version of the current story is the Neanderthal and the, I mean, should we just say the modern human or Homo sapiens? Sapiens. That's how I was like, wow, because they're both humans, but they're just two different species of human.

Yeah. Sapiens. Neanderthal and sapiens. All right. So they separated between a half a million and about 650,000 years ago. And they both diverged from a common branch, H, Heidelbergensis, I think the G is hard. Burgensis. I'm pretty sure that's right.

H, Heidelbergensis. Yeah. All right. That sounds right. Yeah. And this was in Africa. Right. That's where the divergence happened.

That's right. So either the divergence happened in Africa or some Heidelbergensis stayed in Africa and some spread out of Africa to the whole world in Asia. And over time, because of the separation, these groups of humans started branching out and developing into distinct species. One of the species, the first one to develop into a distinct species from this branch was Neanderthals. And by at least 400,000 years ago, there were Neanderthals running around like distinct

species of humans called Neanderthals. Yeah. And they were developing independently because they were very far from each other and they didn't, for a very long time, did not have very much if any contact with one another. Yeah. So we had an episode on speciation where like brown bears and polar bears used to be the same bear, but the polar bears started drifting further and further north and they actually adapted to a different climate, a different habitat, so much so that they became a different

species. That's the exact same thing that we're talking about. Heidelbergensis drifted into two different parts, Africa and Europe. And the climate and the habitat was different enough that it's split into two different species. Yeah. So what you've got in Eurasia is a range from like Portugal and Wales in the West over to like Siberia.

This is for Neanderthals, right? Yeah. In the East. So that was their range in general. And all the way down to the Middle East. Yeah. It was a huge range. For sure.

Yeah. Very big range. The biggest. They were shorter than sapiens that were still in Africa. They were kind of stockier. They had bigger brains, they were by most accounts stronger, more muscular, had wider hips and shoulders. Sturdy or bones?

Very sturdy, just stocky, robust things. You would not want to mess with the Neanderthal. No. And they were very adaptable. They lived in very cold environments. They lived in very sort of warm temperate environments. So it depends on the time. This is what they think.

They think that that range that was so huge for the Neanderthals. There wasn't necessarily Neanderthals living in all parts of that range at the same time for 400,000 years or 350,000 years. They think that over time, some Neanderthal populations died and others came along and replaced them. And then some of them moved down here and some of them were over here. That they may have lived in different parts of the world at the same time, but not necessarily their entire range all at once for the whole 350,000 years.

They moved a lot. Yeah. And nor did they move all together as whole populations. Right. It was a lot of local extinctions and recolonizations going on, they think. Right. Exactly. So it's almost like if you could look at the map of Eurasia on a time lapse over 350,000

years that Neanderthals were around in the area, you would just kind of see these little populations kind of growing and popping and dissolving and then picking up again. And these are actually new groups going into areas, like dying out for one reason or another and then 1,000 or 10,000 years later, there's another group that says, oh, this is a great spot and showing up kind of like our real Atlantis episode. Remember there was like 12 feet of like 50 different settlements over thousands and thousands of years because they're just like, this is a great place to settle. But each one had no idea that the last one was there.

Same thing with the Neanderthal range. So the Neanderthals are doing their thing all over Eurasia. Meanwhile, back in Africa, in East Africa, you've got the sapien doing their thing. And then they start to radiate out a little bit. The sapiens. The sapiens and then get, obviously the Middle East would be a pretty logical next place to go from Africa. And they happen upon the Neanderthal and they're like, wow, we wow, who are you?

And then they were all of a sudden sharing space together. Right. Starting about 100,000 years ago in the Middle East. In the Middle East. Right. And then in Europe, they shared space for 200 to 500 generations. Yeah. Long time.

Just like the Neanderthals spread out, the sapiens basically followed the same path, but there were already people there. It was Neanderthals. And yeah, 200 generations, 500 generations between 4,000 and 10,000 years. It's a very long time to share space. It really is. Like that many generations of just living in the same place. The thing is, is over the lifespan of the Neanderthals, 350,000 years, 4,000 years is

nothing. It's the blink of an eye. And around the time about, so say humans or sapiens showed up in Europe about 42,000 years ago, about 40,000 years ago, something give or take a few thousand years, Neanderthals just vanished. Did they melt? We don't know. Remember that old theory?

Yeah. That's right. They've melted. It was like eight, nine years ago. That was great. Good callback. So, I think it's a good place for a break. Yeah.

And we'll talk about what happened right after this. Well, now when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb?

And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Have you been telling yourself it's time to dramatically change your life? Well, here's how you can do just that.

Register today for spring classes at Houston Community College. Get a degree or certificate in a field you love. There's more than 300 to choose from. Or finish that core curriculum and get ready to transfer it to a four-year college or university. HCC has everything you need to frame your future. Keep the promise you made to yourself. Go to hccs.edu and enroll for spring classes now. All right, so appearance of sapiens in Europe before this disappearance of Neanderthals.

For a very long time, everyone basically just had one of two theories, either that sapiens killed them off or that they were just so smart that they out-competed them for resources and they went away. And that was, it's known as the replacement model or the recent African origin model. And people were all on that train. Some people still very much are. Oh really? Oh yeah, in academia, not just the general public.

I say boo to that. I agree. And it seems like there are people who are kind of chipping away at that, but I believe the replacement model is the dominant model for what happened to the Neanderthals. It basically says humans, homo sapiens came along and our brains are so much smarter. We were capable of things that Neanderthals couldn't even dream of, things like culture and art and all sorts of things. Communication.

Language, probably, that the Neanderthals just didn't stand a chance. Once the sapiens showed up, it was like, progress is here, go ahead and die and either directly by killing them via warfare or like you said, just out competing them. That was it for the Neanderthals. And the timing is definitely, well, sure, suspect, you know, like, and I think that's what a lot of people have clomped onto is human show up a couple thousand years, Neanderthals are gone. Yeah, it makes sense on the surface, but in 2010, there was some pretty startling discovery.

They fully sequenced Neanderthal genome. Which is amazing. Super amazing. And we found out, wait a minute, us sapiens, some of us have Neanderthal DNA in our bodies. Are Neanderthals ourselves? Yeah. About depending on where you're from and your ethnic background. But if you're European or Asian, you have pretty good likelihood of being one to four

percent Neanderthal as far as your DNA goes. Right. In sub-Saharan Africa, there's not any, obviously, because that's where the sapiens were all, you know, hanging out doing their thing. Right. They hadn't migrated out and intermixed with the Neanderthals. So you know what that means? That means that time period where they were all sharing space, they were also sharing space.

There was like a lot of eat or... They were making love. Oh, that, yeah. Tuk-tuk would make love and create little baby tuk-tuks. We have to say for just to keep it grounded, we're not exactly sure what kind of, you know, circumstances that making love took. No, you're right. It could have been mistaken identity and obviously the brutal scenario, which is probably the

most likely, is that they came in by force and there was like raping and pillaging going on. But the thing is, we don't know that that's necessarily likely. I don't know. We honestly have such a little understanding of Neanderthals. We have no idea. They might have been hippies. But we got to throw that out there as one of the obvious possibilities.

Yeah, as much as you want to just be like, oh, that's so awesome. The Neanderthals were there, the humans showed up and rather than humans killing off Neanderthals and get out of here, you old archaic humans, they said, let's get it on. Well, not only let's get on, let's share resources, let's teach each other things. Let's explore life together and Neanderthals didn't go away. They just got absorbed because they were far more sapiens, their traits just sort of got weeded out over the years for the most part. So this is the rival to that replacement model that's the dominant model.

This is called the multi-regional evolution model. And it says basically what you just said that Neanderthals and humans did it so much that the hybrid human Neanderthals that were born as offspring, they mated with other Neanderthals or other humans, but because there were more sapiens, I'm sorry, more sapiens than there were Neanderthals, the likelihood was that a hybrid would be much more likely to mate with a sapient. And then that hybrid would be even more watered down Neanderthal and then over time because of this inner reading.

We're down to one to 4%. Exactly. And the Neanderthals didn't die off, they didn't get chased out, they just became part of that larger human genome. So there's another theory too that's interesting or another interpretation. I guess it's not a theory. And this has to do with climate change. They did a study into, well, this year actually, 2019, in France, and they discovered that

all you need over the course of about 10,000 years is about a 2.7 decrease in fertility rates to go buy-buy. 10,000 years for a decrease in first time young Neanderthal mothers, that population. And they said cut that in half basically or close to it within 4,000 years, you would need only an 8% decrease in fertility in that same group. So it makes a lot of sense that with a little bit of climate change and a little bit of scarcity and just, it didn't have to be anything drastic. But over that amount of time, if you don't have as many calories going into your body

and your first time under 20-year-old Neanderthal mother, you're not going to be successful and you're not going to be as fertile. And then over time, that just means you kind of very quietly and slowly go away. Yeah. I think I found this article from Live Science and in it, they say, by the way, if the human replacement rate dropped to 1.3 babies per mother, we'd be gone in 300 years. So just a very slight drop among Neanderthals could have accounted for that 4,000 to 10,000 year process of just suddenly disappearing.

And again, in this interpretation, humans didn't do anything. We didn't war with them. We didn't out-compete them. We didn't do anything. It was just something happened to the environment and it was just harder to be fertile. And it wasn't all at once. Maybe it might have been staggered in different parts of the world. Exactly.

And over 4,000 to 10,000 years. And the reason it wasn't that Neanderthals couldn't compete, that they couldn't survive, whereas humans could, because Neanderthals, again, their lifespan was 350,000 years. And humans have only been around for 50 to 100,000 years, maybe 200 at the outside. So Neanderthals have been around for a very long time, had been very good at adapting to a change in climate, basically the whole time that they were around. So it's not like they couldn't compete or couldn't adapt and humans could. What they think is that there were just way more humans.

And so our numbers probably dropped at the same rate that Neanderthal numbers did. There was just more of us to survive and carry on after things got better. Yeah. And in more varied ranges in parts of the world, too. Right. That all kind of makes sense to me. Yeah. I suppose it could be both of those climate change and love making.

Right. Right? Very easily. Yeah. They definitely go hand in hand, like er, er, er, er. Should we take another break? Yeah. All right.

We'll take another break and talk about what we now, the sort of current understanding of the picture of what the Neanderthal was right after this. Well, now when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. Hey, everybody.

When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard tree house and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host.

Just about everything you want to do in life depends on what you know. To earn more, learn more at Houston Community College. HCC has more than 300 programs. You can take courses that transfer to a major university or you can jump into an exciting career field in just two years or less. HCC has cutting-edge programs like artificial intelligence and robotics, process technology, cybersecurity, solar technology, business, health sciences, and more. Spring classes are registering now, so frame your future at hccs.edu.

By the way, have you seen or heard of that movie, William? It was out in April, did not do well, was not reviewed well, but it is basically a sort of mad scientist, not a mad scientist, but a scientist with a mad idea. There's a human Neanderthal born. They get the DNA and pregnant a modern sapien woman, and she has a Neanderthal boy named William, and he goes to high school. I did not see that, I had no idea about that movie. Just check out the trailer.

Is it good? Oh, I haven't seen it. It's not supposed to be very good, it did not look very good, but it was very much like, you know, I just want to fit in, and he's a Neanderthal, he's got the regular haircut in the vans and the jeans and the t-shirt, but he's got the big forehead and the thick brow. Oh, man. This sounds a lot like Encino, man.

It does, and it looks like it could be a joke, but it's real. Was there that, wow, I feel good in the middle of the trailer, suddenly like changes tone? Yeah, or that scene where like a Teen Wolf or something, where he's really good at sports or something. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Teen Wolf and Encino, man, William.

There's a weekend for you right there. Very much. I'm not going to watch it, but I just thought it'd be worth mentioning before the emails come in. Okay. So, the image, we're on a quest, I think, and science is on a quest to sort of rehabilitate. A quest for fire. It's funny you mentioned that, but to rehabilitate the image of the Neanderthal as this hunched

over brute oaf. Part of the problem is they sort of based an entire species on this one hunched over dude. Skeleton. Skeleton, and they're like, oh, look at them, they're all hunched over oafs. Shambling. And now they're like, oh, actually, that individual may have had a degenerative bone disease, and what we now think is they just walked around like we do.

And probably looked a lot like we do. Yeah. I think that from like sequencing the Neanderthal genome, they think that at least some of them had red hair and light colored skin. That's remarkable. Which, by the way, by interbreeding with Neanderthals, recent arrivals from Africa, their hybrid offspring would have been conferred with thicker, straighter hair, a smaller compact frame, all sorts of stuff that you would need in this colder climate of Eurasia from having

just come up from Africa over the last few generations. So there was good stuff. There was also bad stuff. They think some of the disease that we suffer from is actually related to Neanderthal DNA that doesn't have a context or a point or a function like it used to, and that now it's actually producing disease in us. Yeah. Like the same DNA, like they could have had the same things that we associate with diabetes

and Crohn's, but it didn't affect them like it does us. Yeah. Because of lifestyle and everything, how we diverged. Precisely. Really interesting. I think that's the alternative explanation for the hygiene hypothesis, Neanderthal DNA. I did. These both sort of linked in some ways.

Right there. So behaviorally, again, we're trying to get away from this idea of cavemen and things that we thought were strictly sapien over the years. It turns out that Neanderthals were actually good at, like making tools in this really interesting technique, the Levelois technique, which is basically, I am in the area where I have the resources to make all the tools, but we got to pack up and leave, and we don't know if we're going to have this stuff there. Yeah.

There's some dinosaurs after us. Yeah. So it's a very raw resource, like let's say it's just a certain type of stone. So we're going to pre-shape all these things into sort of a rudimentary tool that we can later make into a hammer or a chisel, like depending on what we need, but we're going to sort of pre-shape them here, pack them up, and take them all with us. So we'll have this little factory that we can set up anywhere we want, depending on what we need.

Yeah. That's smart. It is, and it's a technological innovation that is definitely attributed to the Neanderthals. They came up with that. It's awesome. In toolmaking, we knew that older archaic humans were good with tools, going back probably a million or so years. Chimps use tools.

They use termite sticks. So people are saying, like, great. Like the Neanderthals created some sort of new technology, some new tool culture. Who cares? It still doesn't make them smart. But there's other stuff we found out about Neanderthals that we started that have really kind of changed our view of them because they're doing things, or we found out they're capable of things that are supposed to, those are the things that make humans humans.

Like Neanderthals aren't supposed to have been doing this, but the more evidence we're getting with the fresher eyes, we're looking at existing evidence, it's starting to look like they were behaviorally modern like humans, or there's a really good chance that they were. Yeah, like the Saps. Yeah. They could spark fire. So the old notion like quest for fire that they just had to sit around and wait for lightning

to strike a bush is not true. They use that fire to cook food. They think. They think, which is a big deal. That's open to interpretation stuff. What else? They know from studying the injuries on the animals that they hunted that they were very intelligent hunters and they killed big, big animals at close range, which meant that they

were skilled, that they understood risk, that they were brave, and that they will get in communication more, but you got to be communicating too to do something like that. Yeah, because they would hunt in packs, but they would do it in close range. They do hunt in packs. And I was at the velociraptor. Oh, I think so. It's a Jurassic Park. The, while it threw me off.

Sorry. You think I'd be expecting it in this episode though, you know? It wasn't they do hunt in packs though. It was, that was just appropriating that line. But what was it? Oh man, they do travel in. They do pack lightly. Yeah, that was it.

Okay. So the fact that these guys would take on reindeer and bison and mammoths at close range with like spears and javelins and like, you know, some hand-to-hand combat type stuff has really kind of undermined that, that replacement model idea that humans came in and just killed off all the Neanderthals. Right. Cause they just did no chance. They, right.

Neanderthals were tough, tough moes. Yes. Tough moes. Yeah. Um, one of the big ones here, and this is where it gets super interesting, I think to me is the, the use of symbols. That is something that we thought was very much sapien, very sapi. Right.

And they can, if they, if we can show that Neanderthals understood symbols and had that kind of higher thought, that would make them behaviorally equivalent to humans. Yeah. And we're talking like anything. Or sapiens, sorry. Yeah. The safes. Uh, we're talking anything from making a, like a necklace set of beads to wear, like

an adornments to using like pigments on the face, like the precursor to makeup and stuff like that. So, sapiens have been shown to, um, to have been doing that at least for the last 80,000 years. Sapes. And yeah, I don't know why I can't get that. Um, sapes have been doing that, uh, there's the earliest evidence is at two sites in Ethiopia. And this is, they think it was like for, you know, identity or, or something like that.

But it is like, that's not something you just do. Like this is, there's a, there's not necessarily a practical function to it. And it's a form of art. And there's ambiguous evidence that Neanderthals did this too, right? That there was body adornment, that there was, that they would color themselves in pigments, put on makeup, basically. But why? Right.

So here's the thing. So that would suggest that, okay, if Neanderthals do that, and humans did that too, then that makes Neanderthals equivalent to humans behaviorally. But the people who are big time into the replacement model that Neanderthals were actually kind of stupid and humans are the pinnacle in the first example of higher intelligence, um, they say, well, if you really kind of date some of this stuff that the Neanderthals made, it's probably around the time that humans showed up. And it's really just Neanderthals copying what they saw humans doing.

But there's no symbol, symbolism to it in that like they could copy a shell as an ornament, but there's, they didn't have any meaning. Yeah, which is a really sort of a snotty approach. I think so too. Well, they might have done it, but they were just copying. Exactly. No copying. Remember that kid?

Yeah. You know what the kid's doing now? He or she is running the company. Is that Dennis Novan ice cream manager, ice cream factory manager? So, uh, cave art, let's talk about cave art, because this is, this is the one thing that, um, to make art is the one thing that traditionally have always separated shapes from everyone else. Right.

Like if everybody's saying, okay, even if Neanderthals came up with body adornments, that's not art. They're not drawing. We're going to raise the bar. Right. This is what the poo pooers say. That doesn't really qualify as art. Cave art is where it's at.

If you can show me Neanderthals that created cave art, I will agree that they are behaviorally equivalent to modern humans of their era. Yeah. And they found cave art. Modern sapiens. Man. They found cave art at the same time that there were Neanderthals around caves. But, um, again, it was just like, oh, well, that was the sapes, that wasn't the Neanderthals

doing that. Right. They think that the sapiens came in and made that cave art. Right. And they found it unambiguous proof at this point. Here's the problem. Radiocarbon dating gets unreliable after 40,000 years, and it requires organic material to date these pigments.

They're using mineral pigments, not organic ones. So that was a problem. That's a big problem. But, and this is kind of mind blowing, in 2018, they discovered, or I guess perfected a dating technique that measures the rate of decay of uranium atoms in calcite deposits. Yeah. And they also found it in limestone caves. Yeah.

So the idea is, if you find cave art, it's sort of like the mosquito caught in amber. Right. It's a time stamp. If you find cave art that's underneath some of this, uh, deposits that have dripped down over it and encased it, and you can date that, then you know how old that cave art is. Yeah. Because the cave art's under the calcite. Yeah.

You know how old the calcite is, then the cave art has to be at least as old or slightly older than that earliest deposit of calcite. And what's, what's the big secret? Well, there was a, there was a study in 2018 that found that some cave art in, in a cave in Spain was created 64,000 years ago. What? A full 20,000 plus years before Homo sapiens showed up in the area, which means that it had to have been Neanderthals that created this cave art.

Do you know what the Kupuers said? What? That's not really art. What? I swear to God. Are you serious? There's stencils and some dots on the wall that doesn't count. That's the first art that kids do is tracing their hand to make a turkey.

They are really holding on for dear life, but it, some people are really swimming against this current. Like they do not want the idea that humans are not uniquely special, I guess in that sense. People have been thinking that it was humans and Homo sapiens that have the ability to create art and think symbolically and it's starting to look like that's not the case. Not only that, that it's not just humans and that maybe Neanderthals did too, but that's possible that this kind of stuff evolved even further back and that Heidelbergensis, our last common ancestor running around 700,000 years ago, may have created art and may have

been doing all this other stuff too. That makes us uniquely human. Well, another one is music, they have found bones from cave bears in Southeast Europe that had these holes and they are like, Hey, it looks like a flute to me. He plays like a flute. Sounds like a flute. So it's Jethro Tull. That is so good, I'm so glad that they added flute to their outfit.

Not many groups, Marshall Tucker band had the flute and here's a little something for me. I may have told this story, but I was in our little local market getting some food about two years ago. Do you remember that? Yeah. And there was a guy in a band clearly and he was like, play flute for Marshall Tucker. Uh-huh.

I was like, are you kidding? No, I'm not, sir. Like you're one of the two most famous floutists in rock music. Sure. But it wasn't the original guy I found out. Still plays flute for Marshall Tucker. Agreed. Just because you didn't write those flute parts, doesn't make him any less of a floutist.

He could still play. Yeah. So anyway, the naysayers with the flute are just like, oh no, man, those are just, they were bones that chomped on by Hyena teeth. Yeah. The flute holes, the finger holes are teeth marks. Yeah. And sure, you can play aqua long on it, but that's just because the hyenas in their teeth

marks. Sure. Right. There's also really good evidence, cumulative evidence. There's one other thing about the cave art that we didn't say. Oh, the kind of sculpture. Uh, well, that was one thing. They found what looks to be stalactite, like purposeful arrangements of stalactites in

a cave that's from 176,000 years ago. That's sculpture. Right. Um, but no, there are other similar cave art paintings in Spanish caves, um, are in different places. So they think it was an actual part of Neanderthal culture. This wasn't one particularly imaginative Neanderthal who happened to leave it behind. Yes.

And it even said, this is art, love, took took. Right. And they still don't believe it. Buy me, buy me on Insta at took took. Oh, if only. So the other thing that there's a lot of amassed evidence for is that Neanderthals appeared to have buried their dead. This is pretty cool.

It was enormous because okay, not only can they think symbolically and like art and creating representations of things that may or may not exist. They can, they're thinking about something coming after this. You don't just bury a corpse for many reasons other than spiritual reasons. I mean, you can to keep like, you know, uh, the wolves away because you're going to camp near the corpse, but if you're a hunter gather, you just move camp and you can leave the person laying out there in the bush by for the wolves to take. It doesn't matter because there's no afterlife.

If you bury somebody, it indicates you're thinking about something beyond this life. And that is definitely higher level thinking. Yeah. And when we say bury, we don't mean they just found this body like on the floor of a deep cave. Like they dug a hole and placed a body in there, positioned them in a specific way. Yeah. They found, yeah, different like grave sites, basically, like cemeteries bodies buried in

the same manner, uh, and they even found in Northern Iraq, uh, pollen, flower pollen, which clearly suggests that they buried them with flowers. They, they definitely seems to, uh, that's like, uh, that's a funerary right. Unless it was just an accident and they just dropped a bunch of flowers on the way out the door. I mean, it's possible, but it seems unlikely. I don't know if I'm being naive, but I really want to believe this. Yeah.

Well, it's nice. It's nice to think about, you know, humans don't have to have or sapiens don't have to have the market corner. We can share humanity. Yeah. Here's another one. Um, if they were just brutes who, you know, who, who didn't have any capacity to understand things or take care of one another, they found individuals and one in particular, uh, that

was deaf, uh, likely visually impaired because of a blow to the head from, uh, as a ute. Probably from a sapien. Maybe. Yeah. Uh, was missing his right hand and then suffered a disease that reduced his mobility and they found this, uh, person lived into his forties. Maybe up to 50. Yeah.

Which there's no way this person would have survived without a community of people taking care of and making sure that this person survived and ate and got around and moved along with them. Yeah. Because they cared for one another and tried to heal one another. Right. Yeah. They were injured.

They're, um, they're disabled. They're ill. Um, they, like they took, they shared resources with them. People who couldn't necessarily contribute still got stuff from the, from the community, which suggests this is a tight knit social group that cared for one another. And then what about language? So this one just knocked my socks off. There are these Dutch researchers who wrote a paper that argued that, um, Neanderthals

almost certainly spoke a nuanced language that we would recognize as a modern language. Right. Um, and that not only did Neanderthals speak this, speak their own language, probably Heidelbergensis and maybe even further back in our archaic family line spoke language too. And that if that's true, if that's the case, Neanderthals have their own language and human, humans absorb Neanderthals, both culturally and genetically, it's entirely possible that there are traces of Neanderthal language that still appear in our languages that are spoken around the world today.

Amazing. Unbeknownst to us. Man, if they could find out those words. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. It's pretty cool. I love that. Oh, I like all this.

Love you, Neanderthals. Yeah. Love you, sapiens. Love you, tuk-tuk. And, uh, I think I used to just throw tuk-tuk around in various ways. But then you developed a taste for watching and make luck. That's right. But let me just, from this point forward, tuk-tuk is clearly, uh, deep.

Deep? No, clearly Neanderthal. Oh, oh, I see. I think I had kind of just threw tuk-tuk's name around as any kind of early man. Yeah. It could have been Captain Caveman. It could have been the Geico Caveman. Yeah.

Who cares? He could be William, for all I know. You know, I thought about, I thought about it. The, so tuk-tuk is officially Neanderthal. Yes. Um, the Geico Caveman is actually a really good parable for the struggle between the interpretation of Neanderthals today. Like everybody's like, it's so easy a caveman could do it.

And this guy's playing like squash and driving a Porsche. Yeah. Do you remember their, their short-lived TV show? Uh, I remember that it existed, but I never saw it. They drove, one of them drove a Porsche. Yeah. And now a word from Geico. Uh, okay, well, if you want to know more about Neanderthals, start reading up about

it. And there's a pretty amazing exhibit funded by one of the Koch brothers, if I'm not mistaken at this Smithsonian, where you can see a real live Neanderthal skeleton. Really? Mm-hmm. Pretty beautiful. Um, What's their angle?

Yeah. Right. This is something. Maybe, maybe they're trying to rehabilitate Neanderthals for some reason to bring them back as exploitive workers. Uh, and since I just said something about the Koch brothers, it's time for. Go ahead. Administrative details.

Okay, Chuck, as I said, it's time for administrative details. Is this like a family guy, where you're just going to do that like 30 times? No, no. All right, we're going to start this one off. This is when we thank listeners for sending in kindnesses to us. And Michelle from Crown Royal. Oh, yes. Once again, the booze company that just keeps giving.

I know. They just keep us in booze. Thanks a lot for that. And I just wrote down more booze. Yep. But we'll go ahead and plug the Crown Royal right. What about those, um, those glasses they gave us? Oh, those are nice.

So they're like these, uh, the rocks glasses, tumblers. Yeah. They've got a good heft to them. Nice shape size. Nice thick bottom. And then, yeah, in that thick bottom, T-H-I-C-C bottom, um, there is a laser etched Crown Royal 3D logo, which is like, so classy, your pinky can't touch the glasses. No, it burns.

It's physically impossible. Uh-huh. Yeah. It just sticks straight up in the air when you're drinking out of these glasses. Oh, a lot of research went into that design, you know, to make sure that pinky was nowhere near the glass. Exactly. Um, Aaron Clark, speaking of pinkies, Aaron Clark sent us a Twinkie the Kid statue.

Thanks, Aaron. Oh, that's right. Yep. Um, Monica and, uh, Kame in Fukushima, Japan, sent us a nice, very nice handwritten letter and some Fuku stuff, pins, stickers, calendars, magazine. Where? Uh, it's, I got it at the desk. Okay.

I didn't share that with you. No, I need to pick that up. And they said, uh, things are much better now. Good. That's cryptic, but yes. I'm glad. Um, so, uh, we haven't done this in a little while. I want to say thank you very much for the Christmas cards from Heather Kay and Sri Lanka

and one from Renee and Eric Chester. It's very kind of you guys. Here's one. Maybe the weirdest thing we've ever gotten, but one of the most awesome, uh, Scott Bordelon. Remember our Wendy's Chili Finger episode? Uh-huh. He sent us Wendy's Chili from that Wendy's. Wow.

I think you're out of town. Yeah. Uh, it obviously was no good by the time it got to me even. Yeah. And he was like, I know this is not, I'm not expecting you to eat this, but he taped it up and he was like, this is chili from that very Wendy's. That's amazing. And he just thought it would be kind of fun.

That is amazing. And it was, it was great. Thanks, Scott. You may be right. That may be the weirdest thing we've ever gotten. He shipped this chili. Yeah. But not even freeze dried.

Uh, and then there's Brooke Bergen who sent a t-shirt and stickers of his work and you can check out his very, very awesome work. I believe his, it could be a girl, um, and you can check out their awesome work at Brooks Bergen, B-R-O-O-K-S-B-U-R-G-A-N dot com. That's right. And that raises a point. If you want to, uh, send us the pronoun you identify with, we are more than happy to abide by that.

Sure. Uh, Claire Sanchez and his King Cakes. Oh yeah. Very simple. Uh, Terri. Delicious. Uh, Teresa sent us really awesome quilted, hand quilted postcards. Oh, that's right.

Yeah. Beautiful. Again, we haven't done this in a while. Sorry for everybody who's been sitting around waiting, having to listen to every episode just on the off chance that administrative details is on. So everyone, Jerry just stopped us right in the middle and said, I have one. We always go on and on about Jerry and her Miso. Sure.

Uh, big ups to Adam Brinton in Japan, sent Jerry some Miso. Yeah. How about that? Way to go, Adam. Jerry got her own gift after 11 years. After all this time. Got her very own gift and meaning we didn't also get Miso. Right.

Sure. And we even asked and she's hoarding it. Yeah. Cause we share with Jerry. She didn't go both ways. We tried to. Yeah. Uh, so let's see.

Joanna sent us delicious beer chocolates. Remember those? Oh yeah. Um, she brought them to our Portland show, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. And they were awesome. So thanks a lot, Joanna.

You don't remember them cause they were beer chocolates. Tammy and Justin sent us miniature clay figures, hand painted, which is very, very sweet along with a very nice letter. We got a postcard from Vienna, probably not Viana, Georgia. I think it was Vienna, Austria, like the real one from Pauline. Thanks a lot, Pauline. Michelle and Nevin of Smithtown, New York, sent us a wedding invitation. Happy marriage guys, Mazel tov.

And then we got a thank you note from Mitch, M-I-C-H, but it rhymes with rich. So thank you for the thank you note, Mitch. Uh, Lowell Hutchison sent us some, uh, oh, these are wonderful. Some hand-lathed pins. Yeah. Remember Lowell's the one who sponsored our, she's one of our elephant sponsors. Yeah. Yeah.

Hand-painted, uh, wood-lathed pins. Yeah. Man, very, very beautiful. And on that note, we actually got a lot of pins, and I don't think I wrote all of them down because we did our episode on pins. Yeah. We felt compelled to send us their favorite pin and spread the pin love. So if we forgot your pin, uh, big apologies.

Yeah, for real. That was a very nice way. And by the way, also again, um, you can check out Lowell's, uh, turned wood creations. And by the way, she donates 20% of all sales to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust too. So go to etsy.com slash shop slash L-O-W-E-L-L-H-U-T-C-H-D-E-S-I-G-N-S. Wonderful. Okay. Uh, Joe Gatherkohl sent us t-shirts and CDs from his horror punk band, Headstone Horrors.

It's a great name. Yeah. Uh, and then let's see, I've only got... I got three more. Okay. I've got a book from Nick Kemper. Thanks a lot for the book, Nick. That is beautiful of you.

Uh, Mike Ennis, and it's a box of coffee crisps, and they are delicious. And they are long gone. Yeah. I can attest. They are very yummy. Thanks, Mike. And then, uh, we got a, an amazing illustration of Us with a Peacock by Callie. Thanks for that.

Yeah, it's a great one. Uh, all right. I got two more. Um, Adam Ressa sent us Megalodon teeth. Yes. They were pretty awesome. Yeah, they are. And large.

Yep. As you would expect. You got another one? No, I'm done. I got another one. Then Kathy Hutton sent us some dog collars. She works for a non-profit spay and neuter clinic in Washington state. Curly tailed hawk is who makes these collars, and they donate a dollar from every collar.

You can just go to curlytailed hawk.com and get your dog a new collar already. And some of that money will go to the spay and neuter clinic, which is great. There you go. Well, thank you, everybody. If you want to get in touch with us, you don't have to send us anything. You can just say hi. Go on to our social networks, and you can find all the links at stuffyoushouldknow.com. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Have you been telling yourself it's time to dramatically change your life? Well, here's how you can do just that. Register today for spring classes at Houston Community College. Get a degree or certificate in a field you love. There's more than 300 to choose from.

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