The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 896: Who Were the Neanderthals?

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with authors Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse. Topics discussed: What we mean when we say “neanderthal,” taal v. thaal; 23andMe; human and neanderthal interactions; how language may have operated; cannibalism through the ages; neanderthal fashion; the limits of site excavation; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. All right, everybody, it's finally happened after years of talking about it. We have Neanderthal experts in the room. This is my white whale. This is my, you know, my Moby Dick story. I've said for years I want to talk to some people that actually

know something about Neanderthals? And here you are. You found us. They have a book. Well, first names. Dimitra Papagiani is how it's spelled. Papayani.

Dimitra Papyani and Mike Morse. And they have a book that's in its third edition. So the Neanderthals rediscovered how modern science is rewriting their story. It's in its third edition. It was originally published in 2000. 23. They were just explaining to me that... 2013. Oh, sorry. I had that written

right here. Sorry, my fault. Originally published in 2013, originally. But, and this is partly why you're here. Our understanding of Neanderthal culture has changed so much that in that time you've had to really overhaul the book

and make major changes, right? So something that happened a long time ago, our understanding of it has changed so much that it's caused you to constantly need to go in and update your work. At some point, Dimitra said, we really need to update this every three years if we want to stay current. It's hard to do that, but we're doing the best we can.

Yeah, because it's so rapidly evolving. And part of the reason I want to talk to you about Neanderthal is not just in my lifetime, but in the last few years, I've started to feel like I had this image of Neanderthal culture. And in a minute, I want you to explain what Neanderthal is. but I've had this image of Neanderthal culture and the way it's portrayed in like cartoons and things. You just picture people with big clubs and they're hitting each other with clubs

and dragging their knuckles along the ground. And then I would read just as a, just an interested party reading common news sites. I would read like, oh, they seemed that they had art. Oh, perhaps they had jewelry. Perhaps they made it with humans. you know, they were divers. They were collecting shellfish.

They suffered from swimmers a year, whatever. I don't know how much of all that is true, but it's just been that I started to visualize them less like some kind of glorified ape and more like a, you know, they just became more human to the point where I could almost picture that something I hadn't ever thought of before, that there was personalities. And, right? And so as my understanding has changed, I just wanted to have someone in who could speak to like, who really were they?

What happened to them? What did they do? You know, if I saw one across the room, would I instantly know that I was by something different? This is what I want to talk about. This is why you're here. But first off, and I don't care, any of these questions, I don't care who answers it. But when we say Neanderthal, what is that? What does that mean?

They were our ancestors, but they were part of our ancestors, part of what came before us, as humans. They were essentially an offshoot of our direct evolutionary line, a side branch of which a little bit remains in us. For most of their parts, they lived at the same time as our ancestors, but in different parts of the world. Later on, they met, and they were mostly in Europe, but again, later in their span of existence in the old world, expanded towards Asia, towards the Middle East and Siberia. And they chronologically, what we call pre-Neanderthals or the earliest forms of,

Neanderthals could be going back as far as half a million years, but when we start seeing kind of Neanderthals with the features that we identify as Neanderthals is closer to about 350,000 years, give or take. And they disappeared from Europe, let's say around 40,000 years. And again, there is give or take and new dates and so on. So this is the Times Fund that we are talking about. In terms of their morphology, they were shorter than us, a little bit shorter than ours, and bulkier built.

They had some distinct features like the shorter than us limbs, proportionally also smaller than us. And they had big barrel-shaped chests. their faces were, if you take one of our faces, you kind of pull it forward. So you will have this part sticking out farther. Their noses were sticking out farther. Their brow ridges were bigger. They didn't have chins.

So can you kind of imagine a more bird-like profile? They didn't have a chin? They didn't have chins. No. But we don't even know why we have chins. It's not clear why we have these. No, there are many theories of why we have chins and what they do, but they did not have chins. I never thought about that.

Yeah. A Niannitha could kick a normal person. Like a Neanderthal could, could beat up. Yeah, probably a neonatal woman could beat up a modern human man. Oh. Just across the board, like big, like strong. No, not, probably not across the board, depending on their lifestyle and, but they were very muscular, very strong bones.

I noticed you say Neanderthal. We're going to give you the long answer to this. Please. What do you go with? So I grew up saying Neanderthal, because I grew up in the United States, where that's normal. Then we lived in the UK for 15 years, where everyone says Neanderthal. My view is they're both right. It doesn't know Neanderthal is going to come back and correct us, so we're good. But I think it's worth going to the etymology.

Please. Because there's a valley in Germany. Exactly. They call that the Neanderthal Valley or something. So the German word for valley is tall. Okay. Oh, I see. And originally it was spelled with a TH, but the H was silent.

So in German, it's tall. And this is something that we all should know because virtually everyone watching this says the German word for valley every day. and now I'm going to go into the etymology. So Neanderthals came from the Neander Valley. That's where the major discovery was made. And that valley was named after a guy named Yoakim Neander. He wrote hymns. And so they named the valley after him, the Neander Valley, the Neanderthal.

There was another tall. There's another valley called the Yoakim's Tal, where they had a mint. and so the money that was made from the Yoakim Stoller was called the Yoakim Stollers. And that got shortened to taller. Oh. And so that's where the word dollar comes from. Oh, really? Okay.

So we say dollar, we don't say thaller. You can say Neanderthal if you want. It's spelled with an H in English. I think it's easier to say Neanderthal. The point is once you start saying it, one way, it's very hard to change. Once we were talking... I've changed two times.

Yeah, there you go. Once we were talking with a geneticist, and we were saying Neanderthal and Denisovan, and he was saying Neanderthal and Denisovin. And we understood each other. No one was correcting. It was fine. It doesn't matter how you pronounce these things.

Got it. All right. Good. Good to get that cleared up. Yeah. We're fine. So over the whatever, since the days of 23 and 23 and me came out and any person could send in saliva and get a genetic profile of themselves people would even call it you know I did I 23 and meed myself I did 23 me whatever

and all of a sudden everybody is talking about what percent Neanderthal they are or it would give it to you like less than average more than average I was disappointed to see that I'm, I think less than average. I was disappointed to see.

What do you do you guys buy that? What are people really saying when they say that? Right. When people look and they get their profile and they see that they're blank percent of Neanderthal descent. What are we

saying? So it's it's accurate. So the percentage you were given, the percentage I was given is, I'm sure it's accurate. There are other things in the 23 and me in this kind of sequencing that I'm not so comfortable with with the conclusions. You know, I'm like 30% Italian.

It doesn't really work this way. But the Neanderthal bit is one of the most reliable things. What it means, though, is basically that we all, all of us who, have our ancestors outside sub-Saharan Africa have a component of Neanderal DNA. But my, let's say 3%, my 3% of neonatal DNA is not necessarily the same as yours or his. Okay. And if you pull them all together, you can actually reconstruct, you can actually reconstruct

about, at this point it's about, I think, 70% of neonatal DNA. So we have different bits of neonatal DNA in us. I see. And for most of it, we don't know what it does. Or if it does anything. And essentially, I mean, it doesn't mean

it doesn't mean all that much. It simply means that some, a little bit of our ancestors lives in us because they interbreact. with us. And actually, even modern humans who come from some Saharan Africa, they also have a tiny bit of neonatal DNA. That's one of the very recent findings. We thought that they had none. They had a tiny bit because at some point there was migration back to Africa and intermixing with it. But it's different. So the big genetic difference in us in modern humans generally,

is that everyone who is from sub-Saharan Africa has much bigger genetic diversity than the rest of us and a tiny bit of neonatal DNA. But the big story about them genetically is that they are much more diverse than us. Because we as a species developed in sub-Saharan Africa, and it's a whole different story, how we're where and when. but at some or at different points it wasn't only one point there were several probably waves of leaving Africa some less successful than others but basically you have what you call

a bottleneck event imagined that you have the big bottle in Africa and then just a segment of that population leaves and this is what the modern humans us homo sapiens who come from outside sub-Saharan Africa. We are much genetically diverse than the sub-Saharan African. Much less diverse. Yes, much less diverse genetically. And because of ancestors mixed with

neanderthals and Denisovans, we have that little bit of neanderthal DNA. For most of it, we don't know what it does. And for most of DNA, we don't know what they, like if you take a specific gene, we still don't know. For some of them, we don't know. They may cause this disease. or that. But generally, we're not yet at the point we're going to say, oh, this gene does this, no, we don't know yet. It's like a language that we cannot quite read yet. I think there's a bigger question about, like, are you above average or below average Neanderthal? And to me, the big answer is most of the world outside of Africa is about the same. It's like 2% plus or minus a little bit. I mean, originally when they started,

when you first could send your DNA off to get its sequence, it would be between 1 and 4%. And you could get excited by that. When they've refined it, it's down, it's mostly towards 2%. Everywhere around the world. Outside of Africa. Yeah, outside.

Which to me tells an amazing story, which is when that bottleneck of Homo sapiens left Africa, they must have intermixed very quickly with Neanderthals because Europe is not that different from East Asia, for example, or even the people that made it to the Americas. It's all about the same percentage of Neanderthal DNA. That a little bit surprised me because I would picture, as humans are spreading around the world, I would picture that some bands of people, some clans,

social or whatever social organization structures there were, I would picture that some would go in whatever direction and have a different level of running, a different level of integration with Neanderthals, and then carry that off in whatever direction they went, especially people that went out on colonized islands, that I would just guess that if you went around the world, you'd find much greater concentrations of, you know, whatever, in some area,

because those people that became those people had just a different experience. Does that make any sense at all? Well, the numbers were so small back then. So we went to see this geneticist, Josh Akey. And I don't quite know what these numbers mean, but he said the Homo sapien breeding population was about 10,000.

So that doesn't mean there were 10,000 human beings, but in terms of like who is of an age, and the ability to reproduce. And the Neanderthal breeding population, they think was about 1,000 at the time that they met. So it was about 10 to 1. And in fact, from very early on, the kind of hybrids that they find

are modern humans with about 10% Neanderthal DNA. So as they're coming out of Africa, they're part of the same breeding population, then that 10% kind of spreads around to everyone, and then it's been slowly getting whittled down. It's being selected out. So, I mean, another geneticist used the term toxic, that Neanderthal DNA is toxic.

That's a branding problem for Neanderthals. So, you know, as life goes on, we have less and less of it. Got it, got it. How do you imagine? How do you imagine? What is the interaction? I mean, I know we don't know. I know we don't know, but how do we imagine it?

Was the interaction, was it around that Neanderthals are kidnapping, homo sapient females? Is it they're living in bliss? They're living in mixed communities. There's sort of a, there's sort of a warfare element to it of taking captive. and breeding with those captives. What are some of the guesses? What are some of the guesses of, or they go like, wow, these people are amazing looking.

I'd love to breathe with one of them. I think we can safely say that there wasn't only one scenario. Okay. And, you know, people met and it could be. a whole range of things from a chance encounter or a chance mating episode to, I wouldn't say living together, because culturally we don't see that level. Okay. But maybe, actually, now that I think of it, there has, you probably refer to a kind of a recent

story just a few months ago about a sex bias. Yes. Now, the sex bias, in that case, they mean it basically how sex are represented in the DNA. Not necessarily... It was primarily male Neanderthals breeding with female humans. No, no, no. No. So, the bias could be that you had more Neanderthal men interbreeding with more modern human women.

Okay. But it could also be that the Neanderthal female DNA, was filtered out because it was not, you know, what he called, toxic. Got it. So it's not conclusive. To me, the main takeaway of all this, and it's not just humans, but it's all mammals, is that they're just very promiscuous. Like, there's, if you can imagine sexual combinations, they're happening somewhere in nature.

And so maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise. It was a big surprise when it turned. out we carry Neanderthal DNA in us. But maybe it just shouldn't have been. Maybe, you know, there's just mixing everywhere. Got it, yeah. Like our being shocked about it was sort of looking at human exceptionalism and not considering what you see in the broader community of mammals in general.

Do you, they had a language, you think? They were talking? Absolutely. How complex? That's one of those words that, So for years, the idea was that, what, you know, the question is, what makes us special? And it's really disturbing that you've got these really strong, you know, Neanderthal's really strong kind of strange faces, slightly different bodies, living about the same time that Homo sapiens were.

But we've got to explain what makes us special. So for years, the idea was, well, we have complex language and they must not have. And then, well, it turns out they did have language. Well, ours was more complex. I just think it's one of those words to hide behind. Like, we're still special. I tell you, we're still special. At some point, we need to get into the whole, there's a whole theory, the social brain hypothesis.

Okay. Which is a theory that explains when language should have first appeared, and it kind of predates both homo sapiens and Neanderthals, according to that theory. We'll get into that. But there's this idea we still need to keep something for ourselves. And yes, modern humans, homo sapiens do stuff that Neanderthals didn't do. It doesn't mean that you're going to see that in language. Perhaps, but not necessarily. Yeah.

So the word complex language doesn't mean anything. Well, to me, it's a way to hide behind. But our language is better than their language. Because for a long time, they didn't have language. We're the only species that has language. Well, it turns out we're not. But we're the only species that has this really, really complex language. Listen, and you're there.

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If you're looking at bones, how do you, How do you know that they were talking to each other? Because the bones that you're looking at, well, the bones that you're looking at are the skulls. Okay. And it's brain size is the big thing. But within the brain is prefrontal cortex. Okay. And so...

Which is this part. So, yeah. So there is, so let me just rewind. There was a day that, when Demetra was a postdoc at Southampton in the UK, she came home one day and she's like, Mike, I said, saw this guy, Robin Dunbar speak, and he explains everything. And you were just like bursting with excitement. It's like, okay, what does he explain?

You're like, why do people sing at soccer matches? Why do people sing in church? Why do we have language? What's our social organization? It all comes together in this one big theory. Please tell me the theory. So the theory is that, so prefrontal cortex is correlated with group size. So if you go, if you look at chimpanzees, which is a nice proxy for our ancestors pre-homo, our oldest ancestors from six million years ago, they live in groups of 50 to 55 individuals.

So how do they keep the group together? How do they know that they're in that group? They do grooming. They spend a lot of the day picking little insects off each other's backs. If you've ever had someone rub your back, it's incredibly relaxing. There's brain changes, there's endorphins. You feel very close to this person. So in chimpanzees, they groom each other to the point that they all feel like one unit together. Got it. So as your prefrontal cortex grows, as the brain gets bigger, the group size gets bigger. So we today have a natural group size of 150, which is called the Dunbar number.

Okay. And there's so many incredible things about the Dunbar number. My favorite is that it's a hard stop at 150. So if you have like a group of 151, it will break up into two groups. It's just our brains can't, we don't have the capacity for a group larger than 150. And so you'll see this in the ways companies are organized, the way the military is organized. I once experienced this myself when I went to a conference. that had 135 people there.

And after a couple of days, you could walk up to anyone in that conference and just say, hi, I'm Mike, here's what I'm doing, who are you? And you could just have the most amazing conversation the next day you would feel like old friends. If there were 1,000 people at that conference, and I walked up to someone and said, hi, I'm Mike.

They might think, who is this guy? You know, like coming up to me like this. So we obviously live in. Yeah, that's interesting. That the size of the group, it does. the size of the group informs or dictates what would be an appropriate way to approach somebody. People that you can maintain daily contact with. And that's fairly small because you have to think of it in terms of how much time,

how much of your own time and energy you have to spend to maintain that contact. There's the bigger group of people that you are in contact with regularly, like your friends, but they don't live in the same town. Maybe every one couple of weeks, you exchange a text message or there's something like a sporting event that he suddenly interacted with a lot for a small amount of time. And then you don't forget about them,

but you kind of don't interact with them for like a month, but they're still there. They're still in your brain. You still spend some time with them. And there is the people, back then when Robin Dunmer wrote this theory that he called the Christmas card group, the people that,

the 100 plus, that, you know, you consider them your friends, you consider them part of your network, but you may not even talk to them in the year. Still, you'll send them a card. Yes, who you'd invite to your wedding if you had a good budget. So think of it this way,

or if you, even in a dinner part, if you have a small dinner party with four, that's fine. If you have a bigger group, eventually people will kind of split naturally, into smaller groups. And the idea is that in an evolutionary sense, though, if you project that in an evolutionary sense,

you can't do the sort of grooming that primates do with a group of even 50 people. So what do you do instead to maintain those connections? And he says, you gossip. That's where language comes in. Okay.

That instead of spending time one-on-one, grooming, you can spend time with a bigger group at a time. And you spend that time, you know, telling stories, discussing things, gossiping about other people. And that's how you maintain that network. In terms of time, it's a more efficient language gives you a more efficient way to maintain that network. Okay. And then you build other things in like, you know, now we call it dinner parties.

Back then it was, I killed a big deer. do you want to come over and help me with butchering it and take some of the food? And I know that you will invite me over when you do the same thing. So at some point between the kind of 55 maximum of chimpanzees and the 150 of us, there had to be language to maintain that group size. And Robin Dunbar puts it somewhere between a million years ago and 500,000 years ago. do you feel that if you look at the timing of of humans leaving africa okay would the timing be that if the neanderthals had a language they spoke neanderthal let's say um wouldn't it have been

incomprehensible to homo sapiens do i mean like was the right amount of time gone by that they would have developed these entirely different languages and and by that i mean if you look at when humans are spreading around the world, Europeans developed a certain skin tone, language families, right? So that when they finally come together with Native Americans, all those years later, they're coming from a commonplace. When they finally re-meet, the languages are incomprehensible, the cultures are largely incompatible, they look totally different. They don't even they don't barely recognize each other. They

have, there's a reluctance to even accept them as fellow human beings, right? So would Neanderthal language out in Western Europe would have been probably something totally different than what Homo sapiens spoke when they met. They weren't yelling hello across the valley. Yeah, I think when we talk about Neanderthal language, I think

which I don't think they had the same, all Neanderthus had the same language. Okay. I mean, it's completely theoretical now, but I can't imagine that people who were not in regular contact would speak the same language. They probably had something similar to maybe our families of languages or, you know, groups that were in western, in southwest France, probably had different, language from groups in Germany. Got it. So, like, different Neanderthal communities might have had totally different words,

quote-unquote words for things. From what we know for how language works, unless you are regularly interacting with another group, you wouldn't have the same language. I mean, even now, French and German are part, are both in the European languages and have a relatively very recent, ancestor common ancestor as languages but you can't they're not the same

I mean it takes it takes it's closer than Greek and German which also again in the European languages but it takes time to learn it

even if you have like Russian and Croatian the closer in terms of evolution as languages, they're closer together, but you can't just walk from one country to the other and just speak as if, you know, you speak their language. It will be easier to understand it. You know, it will be faster to learn it, but it's not, I just can't, you know, Neanderthals in

Siberia wouldn't speak. If they met a Neanderthal in France, they wouldn't speak the same language. That's a good point. I had a linguist explain, I had a linguist one time say that if you had at the time of the American Civil War, if at the end of the American Civil War, you had taken the Mason, Dixon line and built a sort of impenetrable wall that prevented communication with people south of the Mason-Dixon line and people north of the Mason-Dixon line. He said, in that amount of time, they would now not be able to communicate. Yeah, it doesn't take a lot of time. Yeah. All the words would have gone different. I want to look at it the other way, which is when you're talking about hunter-gatherers, they're on the move. They're traveling a lot.

and they're going to run into other people, whether it's Neanderthals running into Neanderthals, modern humans running into Neanderthals, modern humans running into modern humans. You're going to run into other people. And the first thing you have to figure out is, are these people going to kill us? And so it's kind of, it's a human capability

to make friends and communicate whether or not you share a language. And I think the language can come, you know, you can learn each other's languages later. You can embed, you can live with them, And, you know, after whatever amount of time, there were going to be people that are fluent in both. But to me, it's not a question of, can we understand? I mean, that's like a modern problem.

You know, if I travel somewhere, am I going to understand the locals? But if you're a hunter-gatherer, you're kind of doing this all the time. Got it. I know language is hard because it's like there's no record. There's no record of their words. But let's talk about something there is a record. But we do have, we have some anatomical stuff, like from Neanderthals, that we know that they could produce sounds and a big range of sounds.

How it sounded like, maybe it was more high-pitched than ours. Really? Yeah, they're squeaky, these big guys with squeaky little voices. Yeah, because of how they're... Really? Yeah. That squeaky little voices? That's the theory. That's the theory, yes.

But I think in terms of, you know, if you met a Neanderthal, when a Neanderthal met in modern human, they probably, it was probably mostly gestures to kind of understand each other and see who is this guy, is going to kill me or not. And one side, I don't want to talk too much about modern humans because then we always did this service to Neanderthals because we always talk about us. But the question is, once you

move more and there are more people around and you interact with more people, how do you signal to them who you are and what you are or this is your land or this is your river and that may be where the real the advantage of modern humans was because they thought they came up, came up, they used ways that could have been kind of calling cards of who they are

I see. It could be, I'm wearing this necklace that has shells from this coast. You know, it could be the Mediterranean coast. It could be the Black Sea coast. Or I have this, you know, these figurines, this portable art. What do they do? We don't know what they did. What were they?

Were they the sign that, you know, we are here? Or maybe even with, um, on rock art, is that a sign that this is our group? Mm-hmm. So that's-hmm. Yeah. So when we talk about complex language, what is a complex language and what is, if it is it like vocabulary, is it the syntax?

Is it that you talk about abstract things? Is it that you can talk about yourself as a group versus the other group and how do you signify that if you don't, you know, you come across as other people, you don't speak the same language, how do you tell them who you are? How do you tell them? Oh, we haven't met, but I am friends with those other guys and they gave me some of the shells in this necklace. So maybe that's how you show it.

Or I am strong and I have, you know, I rule this land and you can see from the, I don't the teeth of the animal that is hanging on my neck, that we can hunt those things and we run this territory. Yeah. I'm speculating here, but this is ways that we try to read from artifacts and from material culture. What were they using this for?

What were they trying to signify this? That's a big difference between Neanderthals and modern humans. It's not the, oh, I see you, will we hunt together? that we are a group of 20 people and want to coordinate who is going to you know how we drive these animals to this narrow ravine maybe to be able to hunt them better that I think we know from material culture they could do we know from the hunting they did we know the number of animals that they killed they were pretty good at that they were pretty good at exploiting the resources together sharing the food and so on.

But the more, you can call it sophisticated, complex, abstract of relating with people you don't see maybe every day, that's where modern humans probably had an advantage. Is there evidence that they ate each other? Yes. The humans and Neanderthals were eating each other? Oh, eat each other.

There were probably, there's lots of evidence that homo sapiens were eating homo sapiens and that Neanderthals were eating Neanderthals. But I don't know if... There's evidence that Homo sapiens are eating Homo sapiens. It's incredibly well documented in almost every period of our past that cannibalism happened. But there's not physical evidence of a Neanderthal campsite. And among their artifacts, their butchered Homo sapien remains. No.

Huh. Because, so there are a lot, I mean, I'm thinking like half a dozen famous Neanderthal cannibalism sites. And mostly those are too old for there to be modern humans being a part of it. There was actually, there was a site in Belgium that just came out a couple of weeks ago. That actually does fall into the time frame. that modern humans would have been around. And it was like this little family that was butchered and eaten. Butchered eaten by who?

Well, they didn't leave their calling card. So we don't know. So we know that someone butchered an A of family of modern humans. No, no, of Neanderthals. Oh, someone butchered and a family of Neanderthals. And the timing could be that it was modern humans, but we don't know. Yeah. It could be, yes, but there is no indication.

that there were any modern humans thereby. Huh. So it could have been by other Neanderthals. Yes. So for modern humans, we have evidence of cannibalism, as he said in all time periods, and it can be because of servation, it can be for ritualistic reasons. You kind of...

You can honor the dead. Honor the dead, basically, yeah. Or you keep a part of the dead. Or it could be even for this, you know, in a part of a war and displaying how ferocious and fearsome you are and so on. It's the whole range. But most of it, I think, am I right, is not in a violent context in modern humans. For Neanderthals, we have sites,

with evidence of cannibalism from 40,000 years for 120,000 years, even pre-Neanderthals, early hominids in Europe before Neanderthals. The very oldest skull in Europe was at a puerca,

homo antecessor, almost a million years old, and that was eaten. Really? Yeah, so the oldest homo of any kind, Europe was eaten by other humans. Because it has butcher marks on it. Yeah, it has butcher marks.

Wow. It has butcher marks and also in, inside in France and inside in Croatia, that you can see that the bones are snapped and cut up exactly the same way that they snap and cut up the animal bones. Oh, really? So that's like an eating for food. I mean, if you look at like the history of, go look at the history of great. lakes tribes tribes along the st lawrence the iroquois and new york right they would practice a widespread cannibalism related to warfare meaning you'd catch prisoners and there was a sort of ritualistic

cannibalism very widespread very well documented again and again and again but it was usually tied to it wasn't tied to like boy i'm hungry it was tied to like it was tied to like do like a type of domination, right? Perhaps some sort of religious element to it, but it wasn't like I'm going out to get something to eat. I'll go hunt down a human to eat. But with this case, that might be what was going on? It might be like you viewed them as a food source?

Warfare is a really recent thing in terms of human behavior. Like organized warfare against other groups where you, you, you, you kill off a lot of people and you take control. That's like one of the most recent homo-sapian behaviors to develop. That's recently. So like 20, 30,000 years. What? Really?

Yeah. Yeah. So you don't think there were wars between Neanderthals and modern humans. It's not that there were, well, there were fights, let's say, because there's always fights and battles. But in terms of let's go and kill everybody. Or let's take the women and kill everyone else. That's a much more recent development.

Like when you make a big old plan, it's got step one, step two, step three. But a lot of cannibalism is linked somehow to protein shortages. Okay. I mean, the biggest state example is the Aztec Empire. Okay. which, you know, was a very, was, you know, probably one of the, at its heyday was probably one of the biggest in the world before the conquest. And they, they had kind of state organized cannibalism of prisoners of war. But they also, you know, they didn't have a lot of other good ways to feed protein to the whole population.

So you think it was, it was that cannibalism in the Aztec was driven by like literally a need for food? This is, now, I was a graduate student in anthropology, and this is a very unpopular view in anthropology departments. Oh, yeah, no, I know. It happens. Even what I was telling you about the Great Lakes tribes in the Urquay, people, it's ridiculous, but it's somehow controversial to talk about things that are, like, incredibly well documented. Yeah. Well, there's always a reluctance, because cannibalism is a slur against a group. Oh, they practice cannibalism.

That means they weren't quite as civilized as us. I want to clarify. I don't hold that opinion. I mean, I don't practice. I don't practice. But we're talking about people live hundreds of years ago, I don't hold it as a, I don't count it against them. Well, we can go to the store and buy as much meat as we want.

But if there's a certain kind of hunger, like you can eat as much nuts and fruit and vegetables as you want. But if you haven't had enough protein, there's a certain kind of hunger that's almost unbearable. Yeah. I see. And, yeah, I don't, it's, it's always been a part of our ancestors' behavior. And it could be, you know, some, a respected elder died, and you honor him by consuming everything, and then everyone gets fed.

Yeah. Or it could be, you know, as part of a battle against some group. I mean, so, like, this site in Belgium, I mentioned is like a Neanderthal family. We don't know that there were... What were the dynamics of the family? Well, I think it was the... It was... I think it was the men were closely related

and the women had come in from somewhere else. Okay. But even that we don't know... How big was the group? There's like six or so individuals, but we don't know that they were all like slaughtered and butchered at the same time. It could be...

Because things get preserved in caves. That it could be that... You know, and as, you know, frankly that's a lot of meat you know that's six people is going to feed hundreds yeah so you wouldn't you wouldn't kill six people in neanderthal times purely for food um maybe they maybe it was done one or two at a time and they just happened to wash into the washing that how heavy was a neonathal if you had to guess i think let's say 150 pounds okay so i would say humans would have a poor yield like if a deer

40% but I bet you humans have a super low yield a super low meat yield yeah so if you have a hundred let's say you have a 150 pound Neanderthal let's say you get 50 pounds

yeah that's a lot 50 pounds of flesh off that sucker well and the Aztecs could cook him into a soup but Neanderthals didn't exactly have big cauldrons you know to get it to really express ways of cooking soup though. That's a really interesting idea to think about. They'd be like, that's a lot of meat. Yeah.

There are a couple of studies that it wouldn't be very, Neanderthals wouldn't be, or humans are not generally very nutritious to eat. I don't know. Because they're generally lean, I don't know. But I think in the context of starvation, then that probably changes the equation. I mean, you asked earlier, 40,000 modern humans may have been there, may have been nearby, and that may have increased the pressures on that population, on that small group of Neanderthals. And, I mean, just, and as Mike said, we have these individuals in a cave,

but a cave is not a reflection of what was actually happening across that group. it's whoever happened to be brought back to the cave, cut up, eaten up, and so on. There probably were more people from that group over a hundred years, say, who died and never didn't die in the cave, never brought to the cave. Because why would you do that

unless you have, you really want someone in the family to bury them properly and bring them in a cave? Maybe they only brought the butchered people into the cave. An IHeart Radio experience. You end up hell with weekend gold tickets to Lassau Montreal. Thomas Rett. Mumford and Sons. Well, here's my pride and here's my shame.

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it has cattle bun. It has sheep bones and just interspersed, interlaid with it are Neanderthal bones. Meaning that they're just routinely eating what I bring home today. Today I brought home a turtle. Yes, I brought home a horse. Last week I brought home, last week I brought home another Neanderthal. Yeah. And it was just all treated the same.

Or does it seem different somehow? It's hard to tell. Like he just asked me, now he's crapping it like that. And I said, who knows? Because Krapina, which is a site in Croatia, that has... It has like 30, at least, I mean, the numbers go back and forth, but probably 30 individual Neanderthals, a lot of whom were butchered. In a Neanderthal camp. In a cave site.

In a cave site. But I said, who knows? Because it was excavated and almost completely excavated. The whole thing was dug out excavated. Like 120 years ago. Yeah. And probably if... We have no idea.

Yeah, basically. But they kept the human bones. They probably threw away a lot of the animal bones. Now we, if we excavated it now, if we go in really fine detail and take a lot of time to excavate it and actually see that they come from the same place. Yeah, there was a bias of what they were looking, what they were looking for. Yeah. There was a, it wasn't a, it was, the methods were very different. And they just couldn't look at this, didn't want, didn't have the same questions that we have, couldn't look at this level of,

detail and you just can't go back and reconstruct. Got it. In more recent excavations, you begin to ask those questions and you do things what I said, like what I said, they cut up the same way. But then caves are not, it's not like you go in and do something this year or this spring and then you go back in the fall or next year and so on, you can see that nicely laid out in layers. Caves are often, the stuff is

often compressed and what you see in a slice like this could be a few hundred years. Okay. It could be a few thousand years. You can't really go into that level of detail. Yeah, everything is kind of ground in together. Yes. Again, not always, but

often. In some cases you have in caves what could be burials of Neanderthals. there are even like in Cedron it was it wasn't mixed together we just know that they were

they ate those Cedron is a cave in Spain that's another famous site of where it seems like a small group of closely related Neanderthals were butchered but also butchered animal bones I mean how do you know that it was butchered

because the butchering looks just like the animal bones yeah in a sense they were not treated us more special. Yeah, no, I got it. You know the, um, you guys remember the Donner Party? Yes. Right? These, many years later, these researchers went into the, the midden sites where the

Donner party were eating their dogs and some, some things they killed and their livestock, right? And they were expecting, they were wondering, where are the human bones? because we know that members of the Donner Party were practicing cannibalism. They don't find the human bones. So then people pointed out, well, they must not have done it. The question is, perhaps they regarded those remains differently. Meaning you were forced to commit cannibalism.

You were forced to eat your relatives. But that doesn't mean that you flick the bones out with the dog bones. Right? they might have had a separate way out of respect or whatever that they would have entombed those remains or burned them up in a fire or something that was more ceremonial, even though they ate them. Something was more ceremonial than throwing them in the garbage pile. Well, there's also a huge difference in time scales.

So you could go to the Donner Party, which was not that long ago. You can go to that site and see where things are. But a lot of these Neanderthal cave sites, the bones all get washed down into a gully. So we don't know where they were originally. But the reason they're preserved is that they're washed into a, like an easy to, a hard to get to place in the cave.

Okay, I got you. What evidence do we have of how they dressed? And did they, and I remember seeing, like, this idea that they had jewelry. And I can't remember the details. but someone throwing out the idea that maybe they were getting the idea of wearing jewelry from modern humans. Okay. Yep.

Like, what were they wearing and were they like beautifying themselves? Yeah. Okay. So some of these things we can answer and some we cannot. I'll start with the beautifying, okay? And the skin. I mean, we do tattoos. We do coloring with red ochre or whatever.

none of this will survive. Got it. So they could be having elaborate rituals of getting together and painting and, you know, my group does this, your group does that. We will have no idea about that. There would be no way to know if they were tattooing

themselves. No. All we would have, or we do have sometimes, is the pigments. We know that sometimes they use pigments, not as much as we don't, the finds are not as frequent as for modern humans later, but we do know that they were aware of them. You know,

there could be whole areas of stuff that they were doing that we just cannot have any handle on. Whether they use clothing, they did, because they wouldn't have survived in Ice Age Europe without clothing. Now saying,

Ice Age Europe, it wasn't always uniformly cold. Some periods were fairly warm, even as warm as today. But generally, to survive, especially overnight, it would require some kind of clothing. Would it require tailored clothing, or do you think they could have just draped themselves with skins? So tailored clothing definitely have been better. We don't have any evidence of needles from Neanderthals. We have them from modern humans very early on, but not from Neanderth. But we do know that they could make string and maybe they could fashion something this way. So the general thing is that they must have used, you know, they had some kind of clothing. How, came back to the elaborate, the word elaborate that can we can use for anything.

How elaborate it was, whether it was, you know, fashion. enough to provide better protection from cold, we don't quite know. Jewelry, we have some evidence of using jewelry. And going back to that crappiness side, they had... Eagle talents. Yes, the Eagle talents that... Now the researchers think that they were fit together in a sort of necklace, because they also have kind of wear on the sides from rubbing against each other.

Oh, really? Like a necklace of eagle talons. Yes. Again, it's not all that common, but we know that they did. And they did perforate shells. The thing that you mentioned about did they learn from modern humans. there is this time frame

in southwest France we have Neanderthals and modern humans at the same time towards the end of the presence of the Neanderthals in the beginning of modern humans in Europe we have some sites where they overlap but overlap in a prehistoric sense which means that one could be here Neanderals could be here

now and for a few years in one site and then leave and then 100 years later or 50 years later modern humans come

no actual direct interaction with them understood and we're talking earlier about genetics and interbreeding and so on and how things have changed back when we were

graduate students the idea was that modern humans and nanadles were in that part of France at the same time but they did not mix with each other

because we didn't know the whole genetics things hadn't come in yet yeah like we didn't know that they were hooking up absolutely not they had a barrier they did not want to do that they were not doing that ever somebody actually who wrote a book

it's kind of he writes more popular archaeology for a bigger audience and he wrote a little book I think or Peripa, I can't remember, is that no sex via Orignations. Orygnaissance is the culture name of the earliest modern humans in southwest France.

We call the stone tools and stuff that they produce. He was making a book saying there was no sex between humans and Neanderthals. It was a joke. It was a joke on other people saying, no, they had no contact. I got you.

I mean, strictly speaking, it was true. We had no evidence to show that they had contact. but we kind of, most people were saying they did not. Anyway, so the idea was there that so the origination side was modern human. We thought it was modern human

and the Chatele Peronian, which is the other culture, the other layers that we found, we thought they were Neanderthal. And there are tools in the Chatele Peronian and shells that look looked like, it looked similar to what modern humans were doing.

And the idea was doing that, was that the Neander, oh, maybe the Neanderth saw them and thought, oh, this works, this works well. This looks like it could be a good thing to make. And they kind of recreated the shape, but in it with a different method of napping the stone. Got it, got it. And the idea was also the shells. Maybe they just saw them from modern humans. and then they found their own and started using that. Now, this...

Yeah, that's really interesting that it was that they knew the end goal, but developed a different process to achieve that thing. Yeah, yeah. So you see something that I can make that, but you don't actually make it the same way as the person who made it. So this was stone tools, but it was also jewelry. Yeah. So it was like primitive Neanderthal jewelry,

or that's what they thought. it was. Yes. But now the thinking is more that the nanodos developed these things, could have developed these things on their own. But also, we have evidence of modern humans in Europe earlier than just the 40,000 years. Small, very small, very localized. So, personally, I would not be surprised if five years from now, there is clear evidence that Neanderthals did shells and jewelry or art on their own, developed it on their own. And I would also not be surprised is actually we have more modern humans. And maybe there was more interaction and exchange and learning from each other than we thought. Man, we're never going to know enough to know enough.

Jimmy, you're never going to answer all of it. Like, you know, we're never going to know was there ever, whatever, you know, was there, like, they ran in and, and, in a modern human and a Neanderthal had like a relationship and split off and. Oh, I'm sure. Started a family, you know, and like in some cave or whatever. Like, we'll just never, it's frustrating. It's frustrating the things we'll never know about how they interacted. We, we, again, we've been talking to all these geneticists. And one of them said, I think we just have to accept that things were messy

and that we're not really going to know the full story. Yeah. There's a quote we use a fair bit on the show and it was introduced by a guest. And it was, the past is a strange country. Right. And then here you get to, it was a, I don't know, it was a real strange. The past was a real strange country. The past is a foreign country.

Yeah, the past is a foreign country. Yeah. So because it's just there's no, you can get a little bit, like you can look at all the times in, and, like when Europeans kind of in the 1300s, 1400s, 1500s, when Europeans kind of broke out of the continent and we had trans oceanic ships, right? And they started running into all these long lost relatives, right? They reached South America, whatever. they reached the high arctic and you have these interactions um and the perception of the percept like people that did pair off right like like french that would come over and they would build a family with a native american woman how that was perceived right the cultural clash of it the way their peers looked at it um just that we'll never know what the perception was

how is it perceived socially that humans and neonathals are pairing up you know i mean like we'll just never understand it or would they have would they have noticed it at all or would it have just felt like another case of oh there's some guys over there oh and yeah yeah that's true too maybe there wasn't this huge comprehension that they were a different people with a different history it was just they were a thing they were yeah maybe just thing that was mostly like me Maybe it just happened. Well, and also... I always like to think of in terms of, like, really dramatic encounters.

It's an us and them thing, but to me, to me the perspective is that it was all us. Like, it wasn't us, Homo sapiens, and them Neanderthals. It was part of a big breeding population. And it wasn't just those, too. There was Denisovans. There's evidence of some very archaic, perhaps Homo erectus. ancestor with introgression into denisivans. There's talk of ghost ancestor is a term that geneticists use when they know that it's old,

but they don't know what it is. And there are cases in West Africa of really recent, like 20,000 years, intergression from something archaic. That we haven't identified? We don't know what it is. And there's even one model that says, you know, 2% of our DNAs, Neanderthal, up to 20% could be a ghost ancestor. Oh. And by that, it could be just, there's a lot of mixing in.

I mean, just, I keep hitting this. Mixing in is just something that is part of our past. I know that you explained that you had these people, the nanothals are spread over this huge area. So you can't speak, like, what the, the calendar looked like for Neanderthals in Siberia was different than what the annual calendar was for Nanderthals on the Mediterranean. Right. But what what was their diet? And do you

see that their diet was different than modern humans? Was the component of their diet significantly different than what modern humans utilized when they arrived on the same landscape? Neanderthals like you said they kept surprising us the last 10, 20 years. Oh, they did this, they did this. It was all very modern. The one thing that they, the one threshold

that they haven't fully crossed is fishing. That Homo sapiens had really sophisticated harpoon spears to fish for catfish. Far earlier than anyone expected, than anyone

realized. And while as Neanderthals did seasonal shell seafood collecting, mollusks and maybe did some fishing. The level was completely different, and I think that was a major change in diet. Were Neanderthals making hooks? No. Oh, I see. We went to see the earliest harpoon points, which are at the Smithsonian. And it's just mind-blowing. These things are 90,000 years old. and that modern humans in Africa were spearing catfish.

Was that right, really? Yeah. And if you think about it, like a catfish, a 70-pound catfish is going to feed a lot of people. An IR Radio Experience. Weekend gold tickets to Ilson Inc. One, two, three, everybody just scream. In Montreal with Dom Dalla, Chris Lake and Friends, Woolly, Dead Mouse, Above and Beyond, Sub-Focus, and more.

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That means wildlife habitat conserved, hunting rights protected, and access increased. First Lights camel for conservation. The idea is simple. Your choice in camel makes a difference. Check out firstlight.com slash C4C. This isn't charity. It's responsibility. Do you see in Neanderthal campsites or in caves, is there a lot of evidence that they were processing nuts and seeds?

Or do they seem to be primarily carnivorous? When you excavate very carefully and with techniques that are available now, and were not available even 10 or 20 years back, you find the little seeds, you find the plant remains, you can go into the plaque of teeth. Oh, really? And, you know, they, you know, luckily for us, they didn't have hygienists.

So a lot of it is still left on their teeth. So you can remove that. And you can find what they, you can find even remains of seeds or. Cake down to their teeth. Yes, cake on their teeth. Oh, you can see the scratches on their teeth. My favorite one is evidence that they were eating chamomile. Yes.

So like we, so they might have been big game hunters, but they, you know, they enjoyed their cup of herbal tea. Maybe it was for medicine. Yeah. Sure. We use it as medicine. Maybe it was flavoring. And it was actually a few years back in a cave in Iraq, Shani Dhar. They found a sort of flat bread type of thing.

Flatbread, I don't know, Peterborough. Well, but made of lentils? It was basically lentils or a form of lentils. in water, probably soaked in water and that kind of mushed, pulverized, and then mixed with nuts. So they had a little recipe. Yeah, they did.

And they baked it. And basically, because the people who published it did, studied this in this side and another site in Greece that also has a long sequence. That's similar recipe, more or less. modern humans made it also at the same site again and again later you know if you look at the

because these some caves have long sequences that can go for tens of thousands of years not uninterrupted but you can find slices in time and you know even so that the Neanderthal thing was 70,000 is 70,000 years old roughly

there was modern human stuff from 30,000 years and for younger also that they made a similar, because they had access to the same plants, basically. Oh, that's fascinating. So a similar kind of thing, processing, lentils, and adding nuts, and even grasses. I'm not very good with plants. I'm not one of these people who recognize plants where they see them. But they had like wild olives, which was my favorite, wild grapes. They would eat wild olives? Yeah. A little sharkoo tree plates and stuff.

I guess. You know, that little flat bread, you could add a piece of... No, I would have never guessed. A piece of grilled meat on top, wouldn't it taste great? That'll be the next article that Neanderthal's invented pizza, right? No, more gyro, you know, not pizza. But, and in terms of, will we ever find this, will we ever find that? We also, 10 or 20 years ago, never thought that we would...

find genetic material, be able to say this person was related to this person. You know, this were mother and daughter. We never thought we would find a hybrid and be able to say that this girl was actually had a Neanderthal father and the niece of a mother. We never thought we would find this stuff. We also never thought we would be able to find the degree of plant remains that we find now. Or fish, for example. Yes.

Fewer fish bones from Neander. Neanderthal sites, but to find the fishbone in an archaeological site, it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of seaving very, very carefully, which most people didn't do. People didn't do this stuff routinely even 20 or 30 years ago. And if you go to all sites in Europe, in Europe, we know a lot about Neanderthals in Europe, and that's great, and we're all interested in that because we know a lot. but also a lot of these old sides that our knowledge comes from are destroyed.

Yeah. They were completely excavated when they were excavated. Now we go very carefully, very slowly. We leave part of the site so that people who are called us to come 20 or 30 years later and say, oh, we can look at this question now. You know, you have questions like,

how did they interact? What did they do? We can look at this question now at this side that we know has this potentially relevant evidence and look at it in much more detail of what we know now. So now we intentionally leave a lot of the site untouched so people can come in the future and do it.

And apply future technologies. We can't go back to Crappina and see what they had because there's nothing left to actually go and excavate in the site again. I'm imagining the end of Neanderthals. Historically, I pictured it. Not historically. In my mind's eye, I pictured the end as being that there's you know one little family left in a cave somewhere hiding you know and the

modern humans are you know eventually stumble across them and kill them off and they're like ha we did it you know we rid we've rid europe of the scourge of the neanderthal and now it's our time to take possession of the continent and shine you know there's there's that narrative right but there's this other narrative that it didn't go that way. And you said it was this meta population of people. And there was far more modern humans on the landscape than there were Neanderthals on the landscape. And in certain circumstances, they interbred. And then maybe without anyone noticing, one day, gradually one day there just

there weren't any or because they'd have been absorbed into the population you know do you imagine it more like more like them dying out right like so the passenger pigeon like we know who the last passenger pigeon

was it was named Martha it died in whatever 1903 in the Cincinnati Zoo or whatever hell it was like do you imagine it like that or do you imagine it like a fading that wasn't realized by anyone. The Neanderthals didn't even know that they were vanishing.

I think it's a fading. I mean, there's this, they call it the Lapido Child, this young boy skeleton in Portugal. It's like 24, 25,000 years old. A Gravetian. We were talking about the Gravetians for these amazing people who came into Europe and much more advanced.

And debate went on for years. there seemed to be some Neanderthal traits in him. Some of his bones kind of looked a bit Neanderthal. And so, like, the old school, who thought at the time they were the new school, was saying, no, that's impossible. There were no hybrids. Modern humans had completely replaced the Neanderthals by then. So we're talking about, you know, if the last identifiable Neanderthal bones are 40,000 years old.

So we're talking about 15,000 years later, there's the skeleton that kind of looks like a hybrid. So I think it's more like that fading out that, you know, the kind of, like, at some point there were no more purebred Neanderthals, but in a way, there's no such thing as a purebred anything in human evolution, because there was, there were mixing events happening all the time. But to me, it would have faded out that way of the mixed populations looking less and less Neanderthal until you could no longer see it. You can't see it enough. You can't see it in us. You can just get it from our DNA. Yeah.

Rather than, you know, because if you're going to make a movie about it, man, you'd make a movie where they knew they were at the end. Well, do you know, they knew they were the last ones left, you know, but that's putting like a level of drama on it that maybe wasn't there. I don't, yeah. I think over the area of where the Neanderthals were, probably different scenarios played out. Oh, that's a good point.

you could have had Neanderthals who disappeared from their land or left that land and never came back even maybe even before modern humans showed up. I got a last question for you. What would you each, I'll ask this to each of you. What is the thing you wish you knew the most about Neanderthals? Like, if you could have a question answered,

what would it be? Do you know the most now or new, like, Sometimes in the past. Like, what is it, what is the burning question? And even if it's something that you know you'll never answer. Like, what is a sort of easily understood question that you have? I mean, I want to get back to your question of, was there language as complex as ours? I would want to know if they understood nuance, if they could laugh at a subtle joke.

To me, that's a big part of humanity. and they had so much but they didn't have everything that Homo sapiens had and that to me is like would they laugh if I said some stupid shit? Would they get dad jokes? That's what I would want to. Yeah. Would they ever roll

their eyes at someone? Yeah. Like oh that guy. Yeah. I mean I think they would roll their eyes at someone but like subtle jokes. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. It's a good question. Yeah. I guess they would put it also how their minds worked,

I would, in the same area, how their minds worked, but maybe how they planned forward, how much, how much they were able to say, I'm going to pick up the stone and they will do this and then do that. Got it.

And kind of how much forward planning they had. Yeah, if they thought, like, I would like to make X in the future but first I'll need to go do this and this and this in order to get ready for that down the road. Yeah, so if I sit on this if me and my mate sit on the outside this cave and we watch

the animals over there migrate how much would they be able to see? Okay so if I stay here in the spring and they migrate south and if I bring they do this and then do that and if we kind of move them direct them this way, me and my friends

can trap them over there because how much knowledge they had of the world around them and how much they could plan ahead and coordinate with others and what to do. My question is not really a question

but like I, you know, I married a modern human just because of no options. but I do wonder had I encountered that Neanderthal woman with the eagle claw necklace Do you know what I mean? Would I have been into her?

Yeah, would I have been stricken? Would I have fallen in love, you know, with that necklace, you know, that's a question. And the other one is like I brought up earlier, is, um, just again, it burns in my head is like, what was the comprehension level of,

could they comprehend, of themselves as a thing. And if they could, could they comprehend of it as being a thing that was coming to an end? And you're like, just probably not. Yeah. Probably not. Because without written record,

you know, they wouldn't have a notion of what their total population size was at some point and that they're now less and that they're losing ground or, you know, like any sort of notion of history. I think it's only really recently.

that we modern humans think of ourselves as one thing. Yeah. I mean, when just the term homo sapien was developed, there were five subcategories. And you mentioned when, you know, when Europeans discovered the Americas and there were people there, there was a debate. Are these from the same creation?

Sure. So the notion that we are, we homo sapiens on earth today, one, it's a new idea. And so if Neanderthals are thinking, you know, they're, you know, we're talking about group size, you know, they probably had their 130. And that was, that's probably, that was their world. Those are my people.

They didn't think beyond that. And then if they encountered other Neanderthals, they probably thought that's something different. Yeah. Like you imagine, like, take like bison, okay? we have very few of them very few of them left relative to how many there were

right those individual animals as far as we know those individual animals carry with them no recognition of what they once were or what happened to them

or no idea that there's something less than that their empire collapsed do you know I mean we know it but as far as we know the way we can comprehend it, they have no idea of what their history is. They're just, right? They're aware of the ones around them, but they would have no way, they would never have a way of conveying like, we used to dominate this landscape, you know? But even that idea that we have is pretty recent. Yeah, yeah. Like if you were even a farmer in medieval Europe,

Did you even know what Europe is? Yeah, that's true. I mean, you had, but still people had, you know, stories, they had religion, they had traditions, they had stuff that was passed down from generation to generations. So they had some notion of where they came from, what their group was without having this, you know, they had never seen a map of Europe. Yeah. Equally, homo sapiens in 30,000-year-old Europe

had never seen a map of Europe. They had no idea, oh, my ancestors came from Africa and we have taken over the world and now we're going to take over Europe also. There wasn't such a thing. Yeah, I understand. Or you could, but they probably, and even the Neanderthals probably did have the notion

of their group was coming to an end. Yeah. Their family, And maybe their parents and grandparents, you know, as far back they could go. I mean, we don't know, but probably when they sat in the campfire or whatever equivalent they had, they did tell some stories. They did transfer to their kids the way of doing things. You know, you work the stone this way.

You cut up the animal this way and you prepare, cook the food this way. all this was stuff presumably was passed down from generation to generation and along that some idea of, you know, were they, that they had ancestors, that they were a group. But how farther geographically or chronologically a notion they had, it was certainly nothing similar to us now, but also most of our ancestors did not have that perception. of a world that went so far beyond them. Most of our, often quite of our, a lot of our ancestors not move very far from where they were born. Do you guys think you'll, do you envision a fourth edition of your book as new stuff comes out?

I was actually thinking when you started that the, you know, the different editions to update it. Our book started because the pre- book from the same publisher was completely out of date. Okay. And I was at that point teaching and teaching continuing education class for adults. And I said that somebody who might, I don't know what to tell these people to read because they can't just go to the library and read all the articles with all the new stuff.

And there is no easy way, you know, no book to give to them. And he goes, well, why don't we write? that. And the person who wrote the previous book, or one of the two also the previous, was my postdoc mentor. And I think at some point I said to him, would you want to do that? He goes, oh my God, no, that would be writing the book from scratch. There's no, there's no rewriting that book because it's too far out of day. I suspect that. I think we're there. I suspect that if we redo it, it will take a lot of work. Got it.

It needs to be at some point, it needs to be like a demolish and rebuild. Well, the categories, like, if you were reading a Neanderthal book, you would want, all the questions you asked, where is the section on ornament and clothing? Where is the section on Neanderthal diet? Ten years ago, there wasn't enough to fill a section of either of those things. Where's a section on Neanderthal cave art? That didn't even exist. So now there are all these new sections And so

We would just We would organize it differently if we had to do it today I guess so yeah Well if you want to find out what If you want to find out what's known now Okay the current landscape Check out The Neanderthals rediscovered how modern

Science is rewriting their story Make sure you get the third edition Right That's right Yeah don't get the first to get the third edition Authors Demetra, I'm going to do the phonetic, Papa Gianni. Okay.

Papa Gianni, just so you know when you're reading it, is pronounced. I was laughing earlier because Janus, my beloved colleague, his father, we call Papayani. And say your last name? Papayani. So, Demetra, Papa Gianni, or Papayani, and Mike Morse. And then if you want, you know, as things change and update, look to these. look to these authors to keep you up to speed. Thank you for joining.

Thank you so much. This has been fun. Appreciate it. Hey, here's something you need to know about First Light. 1% of all camo sales goes directly to fund conservation. National Deer Association, backcountry hunters and anglers, Delta Waterfowl, and National Wild Turkey Federation. That means wildlife habitat conserved, hunting rights protected, and access increased.

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