The Rest Is History - 127. Neanderthals

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

Where did Neanderthals come from? How are they related to homo sapiens? And why are they no longer with us? Tom and Dominic are joined by Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum. Produced by Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Places and people were connected by presences of many kinds. Places and people were connected by flows of stone, meat and other materials, but were also physically linked by tracks on trails. One might even claim that the first revolution imbuing land with social meaning belonged to Neanderthals, not Homo sapiens to Neanderthals not Homo sapiens Neanderthals first kindled history that is from Kindred a book by Rebecca Rag Sykes that came out

last year and which I've been meaning to read ever since it came out and I would guess that every five years I will read a book on the subject and every five years I will find that the subject has completely changed so um Becky Ragsides book was the kind of the latest iteration of where thinking is on Neanderthals Dominic are you a fan of Neanderthals or do you well Tom let me kick off by saying that the last time we had a podcast with a guest you started with an absolutely a landmark impersonation didn't you of uh of liam neeson that's caused a lot of comment and i was absolutely bracing myself for you to kick this off with an impersonation of a neanderthal well and i think it's a it's a missed opportunity it's a sad moment for the podcast but we'll just have to fight our way back

and and hope to win over the listeners some other way. Maybe by the erudition of our guest. But no, I do know nothing about Neanderthals. The only thing I know about them really is a massive recommendation to the listeners. William Golding's novel, The Inheritors, which I'm poised to learn is probably all completely wrong but is an absolutely magnificent novel if you if you even if you've never read any golding books for me it's probably the best but we can talk about it maybe later in the podcast well so what so so the question of how one would impersonate a Neanderthal did they talk what did they sound like I mean this is just one of the many topics

that I'm hoping that our guest Professor Chris Stringer who is research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum and an absolute hero of mine he incredibly kindly showed me around the display on human evolution the Natural History Museum I remember being given his wonderful book Homo Britannicus by my parents one Christmas he's got other origin of our species britain a million years of human story our human story you get the drift the person to ask about human evolution and particularly about the neanderthals is chris stringer who is joining us chris thanks so much for coming on and am i right that that you like me did a project on the Neanderthals at primary school. But unlike me, you then went on to become absolute world expert on it.

So thanks so much for coming on. Yes, that is in fact right. Yes, I did a project on Neanderthals. I think I was nine years old. I was inspired by BBC radio broadcasts on prehistory to do that project. I had drawings of skulls in there and so on. Unfortunately, I haven't got it anymore. It's a great shame, but there we are.

Yeah, but it was the beginning of something and I couldn't have dreamt I would end up working on this for a career. So, Chris, for people who are approaching this sort of completely blind, when are we talking about Neanderthals? When and what were they? OK, yes. So, in fact, Neanderthals and us are relatively late in the whole story of human evolution. So we think human evolution stretched back at least seven million years. And we in the neanderthals are part of the last few hundred thousand years of that story so we in the neanderthals are relative latecomers and the neanderthal story really begins in the 1850s with the discovery in the neander

valley of a skeleton a human skeleton that gave its name to the group, Neander Valley, Neanderthal. So that's a German. That's right. He was a German. He was found in Germany near Düsseldorf in a valley. It was actually found during quarrying, and it was lucky in a way. It was recovered at all. I mean, the workers threw a lot of the bones out of a cave,

and luckily they were spotted and identified as a strange as human but a different kind of human and in 1864 William King then working in Galway in Ireland he he named this a new species of human Homo Neanderthalensis and in fact there had been two Neanderthal finds before that that had not been recognized up to then. So in 1830, a Neanderthal child skull had been found at Ongis in Belgium. And that took another hundred years to be recognized as Neanderthal. And a skull had been found in Gibraltar in 1848, blasted out of Forbes Quarry. And that sat on a museum shelf in gibraltar for many years

so it was the neander valley find that that kind of got the glory and gave its name to the group oh but so gibraltar so actually it's british well you could yes you could make that claim or belgium or belgium yes yes yeah am i right that the the name is is kind of given and announced in 1859, which is the same year as The Origin of Species is published? Well, there were descriptions of the skeleton before that. But we know that the Gibraltar skull actually was seen by Charles Darwin. Oh, was it? After he'd written Origin of Species, but he was shown the skull a couple of years later the gibraltar skull and of course darwin was aware of the the find from the neander valley and it was the the naming in 1864 that obviously started this debate about who these people were yeah were there different

species were they some kind of a version of modern humans so there was a debate straight away some people even thought the remains from Neander Valley were pathological, that this was some sort of diseased modern human. It's a Cossack, wasn't it? That's right. There was a very extreme view that this was some Cossack soldier, a horseman, and he'd been wounded in battle and he crawled into a cave in Germany and he died there.

And the agony of his pain in the last few days led to these brow ridges developing on his on his head all right so after that after the napoleonic wars or something that's right yes that's right so he would be a victim of a cossack from the napoleonic wars um so yes there was some pretty extreme views around and gradually it was recognized that you know the neanderthal huuxley recognised that the Neander Valley skeleton, the skull cap, had a big brain as big as a modern human. So that was recognised early on. But of course, the bones of the skeleton were slightly differently shaped from our own. And there was this big brow ridge over the eyes, which was obviously quite distinctive.

So before this, Chris, did people have any conception that there would have been human relatives, as it were or was this an absolute kind of bolt from the blue uh it was a bolt from it was the first ancient kind of human recognized so fossil human skeletons had been found earlier so there was one from paviland cave uh in in wales found in the 1820s but that was a modern human so although it was there was debate about it being prehistoric, in fact, the general view was that it might be even just a Roman age skeleton and not very ancient.

So people had very little conception of how deep human history would end up going. There were still, of course, some people working on biblical timescales of just a few thousand years for the whole story. But, of course, geologists like Charles Lyell were arguing that actually, people working on biblical time scales of just a few thousand years for the whole story but of course geologists like charles lyle were arguing that actually you know the earth history went back millions of years and so some people did speculate that humans could go back a long way but it was the neanderthal neanderthal skeleton that really started this debate about ancient humans that were potentially different from us chris the in The Origin of Species, Darwin

famously does not talk about human evolution. And he does then go on in The Tent of Man to talk about it. How unsettling is the discovery of Neanderthals to human conceptions of themselves? And how does it kind of feed through into i don't know kind of ideas of um scientific racism hierarchy of races and things like that that really kind of takes off after after the origin of species yeah so of course it it does get drawn into that debate so so huxley recognizing that this was large brained he in a sense saw the neander valley skeleton or the skull in particular as being one end of a long chain of humans that was you know neanderthal with very large brow ridges at the other at one end and then moving through you know some more recent human finds and there were more recent human finds that had bigger brow ridges than others so for huxley this was one end of a long

chain of of humanity so i suppose you know he would have argued it could even be an extreme form of homo sapiens their own species but then there were other people as i say who named it as a distinct species william king described you know really quite a lot of very primitive and you could say bestial features on this Neanderthal. So straight away, there was a debate there about was this just a different kind of modern human or could it be something really different? And with the ideas of evolution, much more primitive. And by the time we get to the 1900s, of course, no really ancient fossils have been found in places like Africa. So the African fossil discoveries that we know about now, those only started to appear in the 1920s.

So in the early 1900s, people were looking for kind of so-called missing links. Yeah. And there had been a find in Java that we now know is a Homo erectus. And that was really quite ape-like. And the Neanderthals were also in that debate. And some of the reconstructions of Neanderthals made them very ape-like. They were depicted as being bent-kneed, grasping big toes, very hairy, head hung forward, not walking fully erect.

So there was that debate going on about them being really an ape-like form of human, a sort of missing link. Whereas, you know, now, of course, the debate about Neanderthals has moved on. I think it's much more difficult to say the Neanderthals were even culturally inferior to modern humans who were around at the same time. So the behavioral gap between between the antiles and us is narrowed. Some people would say it's disappeared. And I think there is this risk of, you know, getting them into this debate about inferiority and superiority. And it's part of this misconception that, you know, all these human forms were evolving towards us,

that we were some kind of perfection of humanity and everything was evolving to be like us. And if they evolved to be like us, they were successful. And if they didn't evolve to be like us, they were unsuccessful. So there is that debate as well. And, yes, it does link into this idea of superiority, modernity. The fact that we're so numerous around the world and apparently so successful means that some people see us as the kind of

height of evolution uh whereas you know i'm a paleontologist in a paleontology department and i you know i see us as just another form of animal in a sense we're very successful in numbers but whether we're successful in the long term we're newcomers in evolution could you not then though say that we we clearly were more successful than Neanderthals, as evidenced by the fact that there are an awful lot of us and there are none of them? I mean, would that be too simplistic a way of putting it? Well, it's one way of measuring success. But if you were measuring success in terms of numbers, then things like bacteria or other forms of life would be more successful than us.

Right. And obviously, you know, if we look at the way our planet is and the health of our planet at the moment, you could see that our success might seem great, but, you know, how successful we will look in a few thousand years is another story. So in geological time, as I say, we in the Neanderthals are newcomers to the story.

And I think, you know, Homo erectus, on conventional views, that species of human, lasted for at least one and a half million years. So we've got a long way to go to match that in terms of longevity. So I think it depends what you measure by success. Is it just about numbers? It's also about your effect on the environment environment how successful you are in the long term and i think there's you know there's certainly doubts about how successful we're going to be in the long term as a species well so chris picking up on that um one of the reasons why i um i quoted uh becky ragsikes's wonderful book with that thing neanderthals first kindled history so this is a history podcast does

it make sense to think of Neanderthals as offering us as Homo sapiens a kind of an alternative sense of how history might have evolved because you're basically saying that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens constitute kind of two divergent ways of being human and if we if we have history and it's made up of how we interact with one another how we interact with the environment how we've kind of developed a culture over the course of the millennia can we say the same about Neanderthals did Neanderthals also construct something that we would recognise as a kind of historical culture, perhaps? I think it depends how you define history and culture. I think that obviously these people were surviving at the time with a culture. They had a whole suite

of features and behaviours that they passed on through time. So in a sense, they were creating history in that way. They probably did tell stories and pass them down. They probably had language. Modern humans did too. And it's not just about even us and Neanderthals, because we know there was another kind of human over in East Asia called the Denisovans. And they're a third kind of human. And in fact, looking more widely, in the last 100,000 years, there were at least five kinds of humans around on the earth. So it's not even just us and Neanderthals. There were all these different experiments in how to be a human. We're the one that survived. The others disappeared.

And obviously, one of the big questions is, why are we the only ones left of all these experiments to be human? As a complete outsider, can I ask a quick definitional question? So we and Neanderthals and Denisovans, for example, are all human. But what is a human? Is it just a particular kind of ape or what is the definition? Yeah, that's a good question. And there isn't agreement on experts. So for me, the genus Homo, so we're homo sapiens the neanderthals i call them

homo neanderthalensis um membership of the genus homo for me is what it is is what is being human and being in that genus uh the representatives have larger brains they have a human-shaped body they have technology um and and so on so there are certain features in the skeleton that we can pick up in fossils to determine whether something's human or not. Now, for some people, human is a term they would only apply to Homo sapiens, our own species. I find that a bit worrying because it means Neanderthals aren't human. And as we're going to come on to discuss, no doubt, we have interbred with the Neanderthals and with the Denisovans. So in a sense, that means we, as humans, we interbred with non-humans. I think that's really pushing the arguments in a strange direction.

So for me, membership of the genus Homo means human. So yes, we Neanderthals are homo so we are human so I'm I just see them as you say as another model of human another way to be human in a sense we've maybe we got lucky that could be why we're here and they're not we just got lucky certain things happen in our prehistory that helped us survive and that and in the Neanderthals case things turned against them but we should bear in mind with all of this that they're not completely gone yeah of course we'll come on to this but yes they're physically extinct uh and may have gone extinct around 40 000 years

ago physically but they live on in our in our dna so you know each of us now in this podcast have Neanderthal DNA around the level of probably 2%. So, you know, we've all got a bit of Neanderthal in our DNA. And that's true for the majority of people in the world today. So the Neanderthals have not disappeared completely. And neither have the Denisovans. Their DNA lives on in billions of people today as well. The way that Neanderthals have been understood since they were first discovered. So as you said, to begin with,

they're kind of cast as savage, brutish, ape-like. And then, am I right that, I mean, for instance, in William Golding's book that Dominic mentioned, The Inheritors, the Inheritors are Homo sapiens. And we see the world through Neanderthal eyes. And I mean, I'm guessing, I don't know enough about about the book actually but i'm guessing that it's kind of influenced by um decolonization the idea that uh kind of anxiety about western colonialism perhaps well it's golding's sense of human evil tom that's what it is it's kind of yeah humans are

cruel and corrupt and and they get a lot are the flies and things. Yeah, absolutely. And then, Chris, am I right that in the 60s, at a site in Kurdistan in northern Iraq called Shanidar, which is one of the great sites for Neanderthal archaeology, a body was found, a Neanderthal body was found that seemed to be a grave and it was thought to be a grave because there appeared to have been flower wreaths laid there. And I gather that this is no longer thought to have a grave because there appeared to have been flower wreaths laid there and i gather that this is no longer thought to have been the case but in the 60s you know the age of flower power this kind of gave an image of neanderthals not as brutish and thuggish but kind of peace

loving wiped out by the sinister intrusion of of homo sapiens and and now have we moved on from that to a position where we're saying that you know what what were the relations between homo sapiens and and neanderthals presumably if they're interbreeding it's not either that one is preying on the other necessarily but they might have kind of interacted yes i mean if we can come back if you can come back to that particular question and i'm going to go back in time about this whole question of the image of the Neanderthals first. So yes, a reconstruction was made of a Neanderthal skeleton from France, from La Chapelle. And this reconstruction really emphasized the distinctiveness of the Neanderthals. And it was very influential. But the debate about the nature of the Neanderthals does go way back. So there was always this debate about how human they were,

how like us they were. And the pendulum has swung backwards and forwards on this question. So after that reconstruction of the La Chapelle Neanderthal, we find H.G. Wells writing a story called The Grizzly Folk, where he really does paint the Neanderthals as being very distinct and very, you know, a sort of dark side, if you like, of humanity. Warlocks. Yes, like the warlocks.

It's that sort of image almost. And Goldings is a reaction against that. So the Inheritors paints them as like children of nature, relatively innocent in a way. And it's, as you say, it's the modern humans are the bad guys. And of course, that was, you know, if we look at Lord of the Flies, you know, we've got that dual nature of humanity showing up, you know, humanity as being potentially cruel.

And so the way the modern humans treat the Neanderthals is cruel. You know, it's a sort of genocide almost, you could say. So, yes, Golding is looking at those issues. It's the other side of the mirror. And as you say, they're moving on to the 1960s with Shanidar. Yes, Ralph Selecki, who led the excavations at Shanidar, wrote a book called Neanderthals, the First Flower Children, I think it was called, or the First Flower,

very much a book of his time. And, yes, so the pendulum has swung backwards and forwards let's say we go on to the 1990s i think the pendulum had swung away from that image of the neanderthals to make them more distinct you know we had evolved in africa and there must be something about the african environment that gave us superiority maybe we developed cave art and we developed sophisticated tools and that led us to do well in Africa and then come out of Africa and then very quickly replace the Neanderthals. And so that was the view maybe in the 1990s, the predominant view. But then as we get into the

2000s, we start to see the pendulum swing back again as more and more discoveries are made, which show that the Neanderthals were matching modern humans, let's say 100,000 or 200,000 years ago in their complexity of behavior. And those discoveries are still coming through. And so now, as I say, if there is a behavioral gap, it's a very narrow one. And I think probably we should look at the Neanderthals as being very successful in their own right in what they did. And we were successful in our own right in what we did. We shared many behaviors with them, but there were some distinctions. And I think that our survival probably was a matter of luck as well as perhaps being in the right place and the right time with the right little bits of behavior

that gave us success. And it may have even been down to numbers in the end that the Neanderthals had been living in an environment where there were very severe climate changes happening repeatedly. Every few thousand years, the climate in Europe switched back from nearly as warm as the present day to bitterly cold. These changes happened very rapidly and they happened every few hundred or few thousand years. So I think the Neanderthals were never able to build up their numbers under those circumstances. So their diversity, their numbers were reduced. They had low genetic diversity.

They had low numbers. And so in a sense, maybe they were already a threatened species. And then modern humans came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, started entering the territory of the Neanderthals. And that may have eventually just destabilized them so much that they just went extinct. Does that mean you could almost draw a map? Tom was talking about history. And, you know, we don't just make sense of history through stories make sense of history through illustrations and maps does that mean you could almost draw a map and you could say this these bits are kind of

human inhabited or sorry modern human kind of homo sapiens inhabited and these bits are kind of neanderthal territory or something i mean because you're suggesting that they're in different places basically yeah so we don't have the data to put them on the map at the same time in the same places except in a couple of places so broadly speaking the neanderthals were in occupation of europe from their lineage at least from from more than 400 000 years ago down to about 40 000 ago. Most of the fossils we find are Neanderthal in that time zone. But there are a few exceptions. So there is a fossil from Greece that I was involved in studying

from a site called Epidema in the Peloponnese. And that cave site has what seems to be a Homo sapiens fossil over 200,000 years old, and then after it, a Neanderthal fossil. So there we've got what may be a brief appearance of modern humans, or at least Homo sapiens, over 200,000 years ago in the Eastern Mediterranean, but then it goes again. And then we come on to the period between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago,

and it looks like we have kind of a similar story, that modern humans are kind of appearing in Europe briefly, but then disappearing again. So the Neanderthals remain the main occupants of Europe until about 40,000 years ago when they go extinct. But modern humans are making, if you like, incursions, dispersals into Neanderthal territory. And eventually, by about 41,000 years, modern humans are there in sufficiently

large numbers that they effectively take over from the Neanderthals. And one of the interesting things is, and this is purely speculation because we don't have all the data, is that we know that a number of those modern humans that were moving into Neanderthal territory over 40,000 years ago, a number of them show signs of interbreeding with the Neanderthals. And so it's possible that Neanderthal individuals, male or female, were being taken into the modern human groups. Now, if the Neanderthals were fewer in number, they're losing prime age breeding individuals into the modern human groups. And that would be one way in which they might have just faded away. Because if you're taking prime age adults, breeding individuals out of a population,

that population is not going to be able to sustain itself if that behavior continues. So what's odd is that the late Neanderthals we have DNA for don't show evidence of DNA from modern humans. So either the interbreeding was mainly going one way into modern human gene pools and Neanderthals are being taken out of their own gene pool, or the interbreeding in the other direction was unsuccessful and those individuals did not survive to breed on. So we're beginning to learn about this interesting phase and how the interbreeding in the other direction was unsuccessful and those individuals did not survive to breed on. So we're beginning to learn about this interesting phase and how the interbreeding even happened.

We don't really know the details. Was it friendly? Was it hostile, capturing females, for example, which does happen sometimes in chimpanzee groups and some hunter-gatherer groups? Was it adopting orphan babies? Those are all possibilities, and indeed, all of those things could have happened at different times

in different places. So eventually, we'll have more data to actually reconstruct how these people were interbreeding. It will be possible one day to tell whether it was the interbreeding of Neanderthals was mainly through females or males or... How? How will we possibly... How do we know that? Forgive my ignorance. Well, because of the X and Y chromosomes, for example, that obviously males have an X and a Y chromosome,

females have two X chromosomes. Of course, there are other chromosome mixtures as well, but those are the two main mixtures. And so eventually, geneticists will be able to reconstruct you know the neanderthal dna that's coming in amazing could it be mediated through mainly through females or males so if it was females that might imply that they were kind of slaves or or that they were being kidnapped for breeding purposes basically yes yes it's possible uh or it might be even the the the mating systems of these people meant that the females were mobile and moving into male groups predominantly rather than the other way around.

So there could even be social reasons why it might be in that direction. So, yeah, there's a lot to learn about this time period, and it will be interesting to see how the data unfold on this. Chris, we really ought to go for a break. And when we come back, I love to talk about what we we can say about neanderthal society presumably societies i'm guessing there were lots of different kinds but just just on this topic i mean what what seems really interesting about the way that neanderthals have been understood right from the beginning is that they've kind of presided provided um a mirror that is held up to anxieties and assumptions among contemporary societies. And the way that we've understood Neanderthals has kind of evolved as our cultural political sensibilities have evolved as well. And I'm guessing that at the moment, with all the DNA, with all the kind of

scientific study, with all the kind of objectivity that scientists like yourself bring to it. Nevertheless, these are quite politically sensitive areas, the question of migration, of population replacement, all this kind of stuff. Do you think that, you know, just as in the 60s, people were seeing flower power reflected back in burial sites and so on. Do you think now, with all the kind of current political anxieties that are roiling Western societies, is that still going on? In other words, is how we understand Neanderthals and particularly their relationship to Homo sapiens kind of determined by politics as much as by science?

Well, it's certainly coming into it now. So there are some people who think that even calling the Neanderthals a different species is dangerous. It's in a sense racist that we're setting up differences in humanity, which can then be applied to populations today. I take a different view because for me, our species, Homo sapiens, we can diagnose it by shared features. That is how we do it. We look at the shared features of modern humans around the world today. And that's how we can say the Neanderthals are a different species because they don't show those shared features. Equally, geneticists can look at the modern human genome and they can find a suite of features there which are characterized by modern humans around the world which we don't find in the Neanderthals so for me having Neanderthals as a distinct species doesn't in a sense produce racial divisions within modern

humans for me it's the opposite I think you know what unites us is what unites us as a species compared with the Neanderthals and these earlier human species brilliant okay so um we'll take a break now when we come back maybe we could look at and work out what we know about how Neanderthals lived I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is history uh chris stringer professor chris stringer has been replenishing his energy with some some fruit tom holland has been honing his neanderthal impression

which i'm reliably assured he will be doing at the end of this uh episode and tom you had a question for chris didn't you about Neanderthal what we know of Neanderthal so both physically and kind of socially well I guess I say Chris I guess Dominic's laid down this challenge I have to do an impression of of a Neanderthal would we have any way of knowing what a Neanderthal sound like I mean presumably they have language um what can we say about language how they sounded what do we know about that yeah that's a very good question obviously a question of great interest and it's one of the most difficult ones to answer of course so some people have tried to reconstruct what a Neanderthal would sound like from the anatomy

and possibly their voice box was not as deeply placed as ours so they may have actually had a higher pitch voice oh well there's i'm looking forward to your reconstruction so good tom if you search on the bbc uh website you'll find a very amusing reconstruction there a modern attempt to sound like a neanderthal it won't be as amusing as this one it's very amusing and perhaps tom should view that before he does his reconstruction but it's very funny i perhaps tom should view that before he does his reconstruction but it's very funny i i recommend you find it and have a laugh but in reality yes of course they may have been slightly different in sound um we can tell from the uh ear bones actually are preserved of neanderthals to compare with modern humans and they are slightly differently shaped to our own

ear bones but when you test the acoustic properties of the Neanderthal hearing system as much as we can reconstruct it it seems to be similar to our own in its range of hearing so at least from that point of view similar and some people think that the Neanderthal vocal tract would not have been as versatile as ours it couldn't produce as many sounds that's that's a possibility uh but of course there was a really let's say extreme reconstruction of Neanderthals that suggested they only had 20 percent of the vocal repertoire uh sounds that we could make but as someone pointed out at the time there are many modern human languages that only make 20 percent

of the sounds you could make so on its own that wouldn't limit the Neanderthals. Language is a product of the brain and language evolves out of social complexity. So for me, we know from their archaeology that the Neanderthals led complex lives. And I think that that signifies they would have had some form of speech and language. And it may not have been as complex as the language we're using now. Perhaps their language did not have concepts of deep time. We don't know. Abstraction, we don't know.

But certainly in practical terms, I think the Neanderthals must have had language. They're leading complex lives. They're surviving under difficult conditions. They're hunting difficult animals. They're moving over the landscape in complex ways and living in relatively large groups. So I think I would certainly give them a language capability. So the idea that they have very high pitch voices seems counterintuitive because physically they're larger than humans, are they kind of have to eat more the energy demands on them are greater obviously we've got to remember that modern humans around the world vary greatly in size and shape so it depends who we're comparing them with but yes compared with

you know let's say the average european neanderthals were shorter and wider, and they were heavily bodied, so they were very muscular and very powerfully built, very powerful upper body. You probably wouldn't want to get in a wrestling match with a Neanderthal. So they're more like me than like Tom. Yeah, I don't want to have stereotypes, but maybe, maybe. Do that DNA test, Dominic. We don't know how much hair they had, Dominic. Right, that's a bit worrying. Yes, even body hair, we don't know.

Obviously, the reconstructions of Neanderthals through time, if we look at them, we can see this pendulum swinging of making them look very human or very subhuman. And now the reconstructions in museums, including our own in London, show them as very human and relatively hairless but of course we don't actually know how much body hair they had and it probably varied through time at times they lived in very cold conditions and a short and wide body would be a good body shape to have because you're minimizing your surface area to save heat they may have had layers of subcutaneous

fat to help them in that adaptation and I'm sure their culture you know they would have had layers of subcutaneous fat uh to help them in that adaptation um and i'm sure their culture you know they would have had some form of clothing um they would have had shelters things like that but of course most of the evidence of that has disappeared but now and again we do find very strange structures that were made by neanderthals so um there's a site in France called Bruniquel, a Bruniquel cave, one of many caves in that Bruniquel area. And one very deep cave has an astonishing discovery. So deep in the cave, hundreds of meters in the dark zone of that cave, archaeologists have recovered a couple of stone structures deep in this cave. They're basically elliptical structures, which are basically dry stone walls made out of stalagmites.

So the Neanderthals went deep into this cave, way beyond the daylight zone. They must have had fire to do that lighting. And they took stalagmites, broke them up, and built dry stone walls to make these elliptical structures. There are at least two of them. And, you know, that's that's all we've got at the moment of these strange structures deep in the cave. Why were they there? Was this some kind of ritual behavior? Were they living down in the cave? The area has yet to be excavated systematically, so we don't really know know what there are are signs of bones that have

been burnt so some animal bones are high in fat and they can actually be burnt for light and so actually they were burning pieces of bone at this site to provide light it's possible this was i mean this was during a cold phase about 175 000 years ago and maybe the cave actually was relatively warmer we know that a river actually went through the cave so it it came from the surface through the cave and then out again to the surface so it's possible the neanderthals were tracking that river in going down into the cave but why they would have set up this camp if that's what it is deep in the cave like that uh is is a question we simply cannot answer and some people think it signifies some ritual behavior yeah um i think it might be a more practical thing that they were

actually living down there but we we simply don't know but it shows the complexity of their behavior because it could be not much later cave art or something i mean kind of monumental or some temple or something like that is that going too far you know archaeologists you know the joke is that you know when an archaeologist can't explain something they say it's a richer object and that's what we're up against here with this this structure we simply don't know what it is and when it can be excavated systematically. So what we don't know is what's actually on the floor of these structures that hasn't been excavated yet. So if there are stone tools and butchered animal bones, then obviously they were living there. But if there aren't any of those things, then that might promote the belief that this is some kind of special ritual structure.

And you mentioned cave art. And of that's that's one of the things that more than 20 years ago was supposed to separate us from the Neanderthals so in Africa we were developing symbolic expression we were using red ochre and we were engraving and and when we came out of Africa we started to paint caves and these beautiful cave paintings of of animals that we find in many caves. Apparently, that was something the Neanderthals simply couldn't do. But we now know that there are many sites where there's lots of ochre, red ochre and dark pigments collected by Neanderthals in really large quantities. Now, some of it, you can use ochre for practical purposes,

apparently softening skins, apparently rubbing on the skin as an insecticide, things like that. But there's so much of it that it looks like it was being used for marking bodies and potentially marking cave walls. And now from Spain, there are sites dating from more than 60,000 years ago, which have markings on the walls that seem to be made by Neanderthals. It is controversial. There are some people who challenge the dating. But I think it's quite likely with all that pigment around that Neanderthals were marking their bodies. And we know that Neanderthals made pendants.

They made jewelry. We have examples of pierced animal teeth from Neanderthal sites. We have shells with holes in that look like they've been suspended and even coloured with ochre. And there are even talons of birds of prey that look like they've been suspended as jewellery or pendants. So the Neanderthals had that. They were signalling to each other in a way that we would see as very very human and Chris what about burials so so the idea in the 60s that they were buried with with flowers is not thought to be true anymore but there is evidence that they

were they had some sense perhaps of of an afterlife that they were they weren't just kind of leaving bodies to rot yes that's right's right. So I think, you know, for me, there is enough, more than enough evidence that Neanderthals were burying their dead. The fact that we've got so many Neanderthal skeletons, some people have challenged that these were intentional burials, that these were individuals whose bodies just washed into a crevice in a cave, or it was a rock fall and the Neanderthal was buried under a load of rocks. That could certainly have happened. But I think there are enough examples now that we can say that Neanderthals intentionally buried their dead and not just adults.

This is these barriers of children as well. So, yes, I think they buried their dead. Now, of course, interpreting why they did it is another matter. Yeah. Was it, you know, did it start off as hygienic maybe that they didn't want to leave a body out on the surface to attract hyenas and uh and dangerous other predators um so the bodies were covered up um just to get them out the way um perhaps uh it could be an extension of care because one of the individuals from Shanidar,

Shanidar 1, the first one that was discovered, probably a burial, that individual was severely disabled for the last at least probably 10 years of his life. That's amazing. Yeah. Yes. He was a cripple, possibly blind in one eye. And so it seems very likely people were provisioning for him. And maybe the burial of that individual is caring for the body after death. So you've invested this care in that person during their life and you invest care when they die as well.

Whether there's a concept of an afterlife, maybe that is an add on at a later stage. But who knows? Neanderthals could have had that concept too. Well Chris so is there any sense that I mean if we look at Homo sapiens history in a sense I mean we can cast it as a tale of progress and I use the word very advisedly but technological advances leading to ever more complicated societies do we do we have any sense of that happening with the Neanderthals is there a sense that their society is becoming more technologically advanced are they differing evolving changing over time well i think they must have been uh there's certainly a change uh significant change of behavior that we see both in neanderthals and modern human evolution where the earliest examples

of uh probably the neanderthal lineage and the Sapiens lineage are associated with stone tools that we call hand axes. So these are almond shaped, often pointed, bifacially worked tools. They sit in the hand nicely and we call them hand axes. We don't know what the people at the time called them of course so these hand axes were associated with early neanderthals and with early homo sapiens in in africa but about 300,000 years ago there's a switch in behavior and we start to see the appearance of what are called prepared prepared core tools sometimes called lavalois tools. And there, the shape of the artifact is predetermined. You map out in the core the shape you want your flake to be, and then you strike it off with a single blow, and you have a predetermined shape of tool. So this technology spreads across much of the

Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens world. And that's then the dominant technology for the next 200,000 years. So there is that change that goes on in both Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens. And even within that, you do see many different tool types. So within Neanderthals, we see them capable of producing tools that would have been good for working skins. So they're wearing clothes? We assume so, yeah. I mean, again, the evidence is, you know, there's no direct evidence for that really, but the fact they've got this technology,

and we know that the tools themselves show wear on them. Sometimes there are bone tools that have been used to, which today would be used to rub skins, and they show a polish on the end. So those tools are known from Neanderthal sites so Neanderthals were pretty certainly working skins for clothing I mean they're living in at times very severe winters yeah so we assume they must have had some form of clothing Chris what's about their social their social structure do they have because you've alluded a few times to their

social structure but are they in you're saying they're in big groups but do we have any sense of are they big enough groups to be like a clan or a tribe or a extended family or what do we think they are yeah we can't really say about numbers in total um i mean people have reconstructed that groups within caves when you look at flint scatters and sizes of habitation, that Neanderthals could be in groups of 20 or 30. But whether they were in much bigger aggregations at times, we simply don't know. As I mentioned already, probably towards the end of their time, there's genetic evidence that Neanderthals were relatively low in variation. And there's some evidence of inbreeding in some Neanderthal sites. We see from the DNA that individuals are closely related. And there's a site in Spain where you have quite a few anomalies

in the skeletons of the Neanderthals from that site that suggests that they could have been inbreeding and therefore that's not good for the genetic health of the population. So at times the Neanderthals were challenged. And there's the tricky matter of cannibalism. We haven't come on to that one yet, but we know that both Neanderthals and modern humans have indulged in cannibalism. And we see this in a number of Neanderthal sites where you find

human remains of Neanderthals with cut marks on them. So these individuals have been defleshed. And so is that for consumption? Is it some kind of ritual behavior, ritual treatment of the dead? So are they are they eating their enemies or is it more a tribute to the dead? And those are both possibilities. I mean, the thing about that is that it, again, it's like a kind of Rorschach test.

Do you think that humans are naturally good or bad, savage and violent? Or do you think that they care for the dead and whatever? Maybe it's both, a bit of both. But I mean, it is a kind of philosophical divide, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I simply don't know the answer to that.

And you've certainly, if you speak to an archaeologist, you know, you will get both sides of the story there, that there is a view that one reason why we survived is that we were less aggressive within our groups, that we were friendlier, survival of the friendliest. Really? Yeah. I find that very counterintuitive.

Within our groups. Okay. Within our groups, I say. Of course, outside your group is a different story apparently and so modern humans were able to build larger numbers of people with friendly relations within that group a reduction of aggression and the neanderthals and these other humans had lower at higher levels of interpersonal aggression and we managed to reduce that and that was part of the reason for our success now these are just obviously ideas and i'm not capable or even competent to judge whether

that those ideas are correct but it's certainly one possibility that's fascinating though because it challenges the idea that is so common in popular culture that humanity that homo sapiens succeeded because of our unpleasantness you know that we were more cunning and more cruel and all these kinds of things yes i mean that's back to the inheritors image of course that you know we we basically killed off the neanderthals um and there is a view that uh around that yeah we we kind of killed them off in some long-term warfare but the coexistence in europe and asia from 60 000 to 40 000 that's at least 20 000 years of some kind of coexistence of the two groups including what we now know are

multiple examples of interbreeding between the two groups so you know it's certainly not uh you know instantaneous aggression and warfare and uh you know i often think that you know, instantaneous aggression and warfare. And, you know, I often think that, you know, the extinction of the Neanderthals was kind of a, it could even be accidental. It wasn't intentional. So, you know, orangutans in Southeast Asia are going extinct, not because people want them to go extinct, but, you know, we're removing their food, we're removing their living sites,

we're removing their environments, and they are going extinct. We didn't intend it, but it happens. And that's what's happened to so many species probably around the world. I'm sure when people arrived in New Zealand, their first intention wasn't to kill off all the large native birds, but that's what happened. And so the extinction of the Neanderthals, at least the physical extinction, by collecting the same plant resources, by wanting to live in the best cave sites, automatically they were doing that to the detriment of the Neanderthals.

Maybe we impacted on Neanderthals in the way that we impacted on megafauna across the world, that we may not even deliberately have hunted them or anything, but that we just... Yeah, that's right. Do you think that's the likeliest explanation? I mean, there are claims that there are a couple of examples of interpersonal violence that could be between a neanderthal and a sapiens but i don't think those are sure for me they could equally be neanderthals that are you know there's a one of the shanidar neanderthals has a has a wound on one of his ribs that's partly healed because they had spears right yeah they had

spears so you know someone said well that maybe that's a modern human doing that well we have no idea and equally it could have been a neanderthal doing it it could even have been a hunting accident you know we can't be sure um of the cause there so what we can say is that you're beginning to find increasing evidence of these groups in close proximity we don't have the dating precision to say that they're actually there at the same time but the fact the interbreeding happened on multiple occasions means those populations must have been in close proximity and partners are moving for whatever reason between one group and the other and and those children those hybrid children they're being brought up within a modern human group and they're and they're continuing you know in that group and they're breeding on in that room

just a question we're i think we're very close to the end now aren't we tom but um just a question about the the afterlife of the neanderthals so two of our listeners sent in questions about um whether they live on a myths and legends stephan jensen and metaburbia whether after the neanderthals sort of physically vanished from the scene whether they lived on as giants trolls orcs all these things which are there in almost all myths and kind of folkloric stories do you think there could be some kind of vestige of a time when we walk the earth together a jungian memory yeah exactly yeah i mean it's obviously going to have to be very deep time because we're talking 40 000 years and for me that's a difficult thing to to establish but

bjorn katen a paleontologist he wrote a series of novels also about the neanderthal modern human interface and interaction and they are really good as well. And I recommend them. One called Dance of the Tiger. And in there, the modern humans call the Neanderthals trolls. That is their name for them. So, you know, there is that implication there that this particularly Kurtem was from Scandinavia.

So that's where that legend, those legends are very strong. It would be odd if there weren't a kind of buried memory somewhere deep within us that there were once you know other creatures who were like us but were not us if you know what I mean do you not think it's a long time and the same applies over in Flores so in Flores we've got this weird the hobbits creature you know nicknamed the hobbit homo floresiensis and was around until, probably around until 50,000 years ago. And there are folk tales of strange little creatures living in the woods in Southeast Asia. Are those some kind of memories from 40,000 years ago of the hobbit? Or are they actually referring to the orangutan or the gibbon or some other creatures that live in the woods?

So I think those memories are certainly there but for me that's such deep time yeah i i don't know that really there could be a survival like that chris before we go just one last question do you have any sense have have people begun to think about whether in the wake of the pandemic whether the neanderthals might have been wiped out by some pandemic perhaps is this something that is starting to surface in neanderthals might have been wiped out by some pandemic, perhaps. Is this something that is starting to surface in Neanderthal studies? Yes, I mean, that has come up that, you know, we had evolved in Africa, the Neanderthals had been evolving in Europe and Asia. So we could have brought diseases from Africa that the Neanderthals had no immunity to. And that's

been proposed. Certainly, there could have been those, there proposed. Certainly, if the populations are in contact, then there could certainly be an exchange of pathogens and parasites between them. But of course, many of the examples in recent history, for example, in South America, of where epidemics were carried from one population to another, those populations are living at quite high density. And so there can can be a rapid spread as we have with covid today we're talking about much smaller groups spaced out on the landscape so i'm not sure yeah how much that could have run through a whole population and finish them off and what's interesting is the inverse that actually obviously having evolved in africa we didn't have any immunity to the diseases outside of Africa.

The Neanderthals, having evolved there, had evolved natural immunities to many of the local diseases. And it seems likely that one of the advantages, if you like, of interbreeding with Neanderthals was we picked up some of their immune systems. And so maybe that's why early waves of Homo sapiens failed to settle. Well, yeah, I mean, they may have just been too small in number, and they couldn't cope with the climate changes any better than the Neanderthals could, and they just disappeared again. But yeah, I think that, you know, by interbreeding with Neanderthals, we got a quick fix to our immune systems outside of Africa, and that helped us survive. Because it's still

impacting on COVID, isn't it? It's claimed that there are some variants which have derived from Neanderthals which improve your resistance to COVID and others which act against it. And it's been even claimed that in different, because of course Neanderthal DNA is spread right across everyone outside of Africa,

has it in the Americas, in Australia, in Europe and so on. So certainly those different variants could actually be helping or hindering the spread of COVID in modern human populations. So yeah, it's quite possible. So yes, the Neanderthal DNA is affecting our immune systems outside of Africa, and still is today. And it's possible that some autoimmune conditions are also linked with the presence of Neanderthal DNA. So in a sense, their immune systems are too active and they even turn in on themselves.

And that's also a possibility. So they're not just prehistory. I think that is absolutely the perfect note on which to end. And Chris, thanks so much for that. Can't thank you enough. Thomas, you want to do your impersonation now? We hope you've enjoyed listening to this episode of the rest is history and we'll look forward to

seeing you next week bye bye goodbye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad free-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.