You're Dead to Me - Neanderthals

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

Greg Jenner is joined by the brilliant comedian Tim Minchin and Palaeolithic archaeologist Dr Becky Wragg Sykes as they take us way back in time to visit the mysterious world of Neanderthals. Just who were the Neanderthals? Were they the squat caveman archetypes we’ve come to know in pop culture? Did they really shout “Ug” at the moon? Or have we misunderstood them entirely? Join the team as we discover there is so much more to those handsome, hench beings that walked the Earth before us.

BBC Sounds. Music, we are journeying back tens of thousands of years to hunt hyena, ride on mammoths, and get to know Neanderthals, the sexiest species of archaic humans this side of Eurasia. And guiding us on our hunting trip, we're joined by two very special guests. In Prehistory Corner, yes, Prehistory Corner, she's a Paleolithic archaeologist who is an expert in prehistoric tools, and she is the author of a brilliant new book, Kindred, all about Neanderthals. Lucky old us. It's the wonderful Dr Rebecca Ragsikes.

Hi, Becky, how are you? Hi, I'm great. Thanks for having me. How did you get into tools? Was it work experience at B&Q? What's the route? Far too much metal at B&Q, although the trial section is handy if you need to be digging. No, I'm one of those people that was always into history, and the older you go, the more challenging it is, and so if you go right back, it's mysteries and excitement. The ultimate challenge.

Yes. And in Comedy Corner, we are in for a real treat. He is a multi-award winning comedian, actor, composer, songwriter, pianist and director. You may know him from hilarious live shows, the Robin Hood movie. You may have seen him going full rockstar debauchery in Californication. And certainly you should have seen his award-winning musical Matilda, his award-winning musical Groundhog Day. He has a ridiculous CV.

He's even played Judas Iscariot. It is bloody Tim Minchin. Hello. Hello. It is bloody me. I mean, your CV, stupidly long. What's your favourite thing you've done? I don't really have a favourite thing I've done,

which is why I do what I do, because variety is my favourite thing. And historically, I love being on this podcast because I definitely have another part of me that could have gone further in studying and I didn't. So I suppose learning stuff from you guys is what I should have done more. Hopefully by the end of this podcast, you will understand and know stuff. Yeah, I'm really excited. And to be honest, I'm hopeful too, because I studied archaeology at university and I thought this episode would be a doddle and then we came to research it i don't know anything i mean all the stuff i learned absolutely out of date you can knock back a date 50 000 years in a single morning literally yeah with the new technique i mean because i think radiocarbon

is only useful up to about 50 000 so you can have a site you radiocarbon date and it will say well it's older than 50 000 but you use another method and you're like okay it's 170 000 god i mean that's very inconsiderate of them that's what i'm saying i think they're selfish i think they're very self-centered they've they haven't thought about us so i mean hopefully by the end of this i'll learn some stuff as well so what do you know we begin the podcast as ever with a with a So What Do You Know? This is where I guess what listeners at home might know about the subject. Usually it's based on pop culture stuff. And the thing is, in the UK, we don't really do the Stone Age on the curriculum.

Or at least we didn't when I was growing up. What most people know about Neanderthals is that they are sort of a very, very old type of human. Old as in a long time ago, rather than old like Simon Cowell. But you might picture them as stout and hairy and short. You might think of them as stupid and violent, grunting, dragging people around like wheelie bins, shouting, ug, at the moon. Basically a bit thick.

And we also use it as an insult. Neanderthal is a slur for someone who's thuggish, dim, unsophisticated. You Neanderthal. And in pop culture, we don't really have Neanderthals in comedies or in movies. They are kind of the forgotten human. Is this fair?

Were they humans? Can we humanise them? Can we think about them in a different way? Let's find out. So, Tim, is that how you think of a Neanderthal? Is that kind of description of thuggish and violent and brutish? I suppose I probably did until I started really nerding out on science ten years ago. But now I understand them to be categorised sometimes as a subspecies of sapiens, can't they?

I know we interbred a little bit or we think we interbred a little bit. So let's talk about the physicality of Neanderthals. The popular trope is that they're strong and muscular and short and stout and hairy. And I'm thinking Peter Stringfellow. Are they? Hopefully not. I mean, maybe not. He's looking at me.

Maybe not on like a thong or anything, but like, you know, I'm just a long hair and whatever. thinking peter stringfellow are they hopefully not i mean maybe not looking at me maybe maybe not like a thong or anything but like you know i'm just i'm sort of long hair and and whatever but actually what have we got to know about neanderthals in terms of their physicality what is it that makes them different yeah i mean that kind of is actually one of the things that's changed least in the as a hominin species they are one of the best known we have like pretty much the richest fossil record for them we have pretty much every bone in the body and spread across different individuals and different sites. But we have a very good handle on exactly what they looked like.

And yeah, they were on average shorter, buff, not just like the shortness and the robustness of their bones, so thicker sort of bones, but also from what we can tell from the way the muscles attach you can see the markings on the bone that they were pretty hench they probably could have beaten you in an arm wrestling match anyone can beat me in an arm wrestling match children can beat i mean i have the arms of a pipe cleaner i am feeble in every capacity so that's not really a big cleaner with big arms once so the idea of them shorter is not me not drastically shorter no so they're not like

four foot tall yeah you wouldn't really find like a six foot neanderthal it would be sort of but they're wider they have differently shaped rib cages so slightly different proportions to us there's been like decades and decades of attempts to give evolutionary explanations for every single difference and that's not necessarily always going to be there because evolution doesn't always work like that. It can just be drift sort of thing. It can be neutral as long as it's not going to like negatively affect your population you might have something that just hangs around. Like pubic hair or nipples. Nipples are handy. For you. Men can lactate too you know. I mean I, I'd spend an hour on it every morning.

Nothing yet. Is that for your cornflakes? I probably haven't hung out with Greg enough. We think of them as brutish and short and sort of like little tanks. And they were good at lifting and stuff. I think in the old days I thought of them in the cold and stuff. But I was reading that they think probably they stuck more to forests and probably part of why they were stockies because they weren't evolved for running long distances

but for getting away from scary things quickly. Yeah so they wouldn't have been probably fantastic at stamina running like very long distance stuff but they would have been fast. That is one of the things that's really transformed in how we think about their anatomy that it was always, oh, they were ice age, they were hyper-arctic adapted. That is sort of shifting a bit because you can look at the fluid dynamics and model the air that would go into their noses. Because they had broad noses, didn't they?

Yeah, and that was always like, oh, maybe it was because they were sucking in air and trying to warm it up on the way in. But now that combined with other things across the body is looking more like it's adaptations, the ability to suck in masses of oxygen because you need to power this energy-hungry body. So it may be that that's more what we're seeing.

It's just the intensity of their lifestyles rather than the climate. So actually the idea of them living in the Ice Age, freezing cold, huddled around fires, might not be true? Or it's a bit of both? It's both. I think people would say they're not like arctic tundra specialists in the way that like an arctic fox is. They can cope with colder climates than now. So think about like Siberia. So like Sunderland, really cold. Like Siberia now. So pretty cold and harsh in the winter but you know nice sunny summers and you know you'd have tundra meadows buttercups we know there were buttercups in mammoth stomachs

oh hang on that's changing for me butter neanderthals skipping through the buttercups they probably got sunburned even even in the glacial periods you know and tim what's your guess on brain size in terms of the skull capacity well my my understanding is that it was on average smaller in the way that they were but some of the fossils have shown brains as big as the biggest human brains but they tended to be distributed away from some of the yeah language centers and stuff yeah as hominins go they have slightly larger on average even than us but not that much but yeah the distribution of where stuff is in the brain is slightly different can i ask a slightly divergent question a chicken

and eggy question because i assume we we look at fossils and look at skulls and go okay their brains were shaped like this but highly developed prefrontal language centers, that can be a result of language as well as the cause of language, right? Like taxi drivers will have more connections to do with spatial stuff. And especially across generations, if you have a population that develops language, it might be because they had a propensity for language because their brains evolved to be like that. But it's also that language made their brains look like that more yeah that wouldn't change your skull obviously we can put someone in a scanner today and watch exactly what lights up in their brain whereas we can't do that with neanderthals so yeah with things like the ability to process complex ideas or have fantastic memory or language

and stuff that's totally still an active area that we're not really sure. When we spoke to you before, you said that one of the Neanderthal reconstructions looks like Daniel Craig. In my head, I was thinking Peter Stringfellow, and you're like, no, it looks like James Bond. I'm like, hang on a minute, are Neanderthals hot? Are they gorgeous and chiseled and sexy? This is one particular reconstruction from a Spie in Belgium,

and he has kind of nice friendly come to bed eyes. Wow. But no, they don't. All he needs is a bed. Yeah. They don't all look like that. The thing with the reconstructions is interesting that half a century ago we didn't even allow

them to smile in the pictures we used to make. Whereas now they are far more humanized and we want to kind of have that engaging relationship with how we represent them so that's yeah that's interesting how that's changed that we can actually sort of make them look a bit cheeky and yeah and they can hug each other there's a lovely pairing at Gibraltar of a female and a child and you know they're standing there hugging and yeah I would have done gags I reckon well that's it isn't it yeah very like I mean primates do gags, I reckon. Well, that's it, isn't it? It's very, like, I mean, primates do gags. Yeah. And find them funny.

You know, this is the thing when we grow up thinking of cavemen. They would have loved and really wanted to shag and shown off. I think so. And, like, played games. Yeah, I mean, like, with primates, you know, they don't have necessarily the same humour as us. They like rough and tumble humour, I think. Yeah.

They like a bit of slapstick. They're more like Australian humour. Yeah, somebody slips over on the ice. You mentioned language there. I mean, we think they presumably had some sort of functional language, but whether they had the complexity of language that we can have. I think that's still an open question. If you look at the anatomy, pretty much most people would say

that the plumbing is there, that they had most of the the ability to produce sounds i would think given that we know that chimpanzees as our closest common relative although don't get the wrong impression neanderthals are vastly closer to us than either of us are to chimpanzees they use verbal communication but they also use a lot of gesture well on that note i mean there is a very famous clip on the internet i think it it's from a BBC documentary. I don't know if you've ever seen this, Tim, but we're going to show you something that it makes me howl with laughter. This

is a theory that's what Neanderthals might have sounded like and we're going to play it to you and see what your reaction is. Just pitch up your voice. One, two, three. Now, let's just add a bit of nasal now. One, two, three. Now, let's just add a bit of nasal now. One, two, three.

Now, the other thing that would be happening, push into me, and this is actually getting him right into his body. I love how serious Elliot is. One, two, three. Now, let's make a sound. Just let's make a huge R. Rrrr! And again.

Rrrr! Rrrr! I mean, it makes sense that they would have loud boomy voices but just the idea of being so shrill just but I'm in chimps go they do they do go they do I mean it's like the idea that oh they were big and hench and therefore they were like bashing everything they had fine motor control as well so I'm sure they could whisper to each other. One, two, three. One, two, three. Could we, darling? Yeah. I mean, I don't know how that pairs up with Dr. Becky's come to bed eyes.

Come to bed! Maybe he should have just used his eyes. Do you come here often? I want to meet that guy. Do we know who he is, Elliot? I think he was an acting student. He's probably now, I don't know, a musician or a student or an actor. I'm going to meet that guy. Do we know who he is, Elliot? I think he was an acting student. He's probably now, I don't know, a musician or a student or an actor. I'm going to engage Elliot.

You can invite him to your next show. Yeah, totally. You can do a duet. What do you think about that theory, Elliot? I don't know about the precise sort of modelling of the vocal tracks. They didn't necessarily scream each other. I was going to ask, you know, we know that they interbred. You've already mentioned it,

Tim. They interbred with Homo sapiens. Yeah. We've said that they might have had some language. What is a first date going to be like

if there is a sort of a romantic encounter? I mean, would a Homo sapien fancy a Neanderthal? Would they be able to talk to each other? I think that the one

thing to say is that when we talk Neanderthals, they're not like a clone army. They were living across a massive area. So interbreeding, and we know it's multiple phases in each context. It's going to be different. Somebody had to fancy someone because there were a lot of babies.

Yeah. I mean, what is it, 2% to 4% of our DNA? More like 2%, not quite as high as the initial estimate. So 2% of Tim's DNA is Neanderthal. I'd say it'd be more with me. Well, I mean, the other thing to say, I mean, Tim, you are an international ambassador for redheads, one of the world's leading gingers.

Yes. It's on my business card. I have read that there may have been Neanderthal gingers. Depending on which population you sample, there are some that had similar genes that would give red hair in living people and also dark hair and dark skin but we can't see exactly how that was expressed in the past so that's basically that's our best guess

that that probably was red hair but we can't be sure but they wouldn't have looked like tim in terms of pale skin and green eyes some might have had pale skin yeah oh really yeah because that gene in modern people is a red hair and freckles combination. Right. But other ones would have had darker skin. Okay. So there would be a lot of selection as to which one you might fancy. Absolutely.

Get on Tinder, loads of Neanderthals, you're like, oh, that one's hot. Yeah. Daniel Craig, that one. Yeah. Now, Tim, you are a renowned musician and lyricist. Do you think of Neanderthals as being musical? Do you think it's something innately human? I have no idea about that

I'm very interested in that I don't know at all I'm very interested in the question Although I haven't read much about it About why music makes us feel stuff How old were you when you discovered music was your passion? I don't know I quite liked mucking around instead of doing my homework

I was well into my 20s before I believed it was something I was allowed to or capable of doing as a career. But as a baby, presumably your parents sung to you. I mean, I have a young baby. She's three months old and she loves music, but she's really into like thrash metal and sort of hardcore punk. So I don't know why that is, but it seems to be quite primal. One would think given Neanderthals are so close to us in so many ways that if they had music they would have the neurological and physiological capacity to react to it but whether they had the intellectual capacity to generate it i don't know i read a few years ago about a bone flute no that's not a penis it's a flute with holes in it that looks

like it might have been played as a musical instrument, which was at the time archaeologists said, oh, this could be Neanderthal. Where do you stand on that? It's one object, but also there's questions. Right. Shut up, Greg. No, no, no, no. There's questions over sort of whether that is actually potentially something that's basically caused by hyenas crunching, although that sounds like weird chance. You can actually find in lots of sites where caves caves where after Neanderthals would live there hyenas would come in and make a den

and they can digest bones they have extremely strong stomach acid so they do weird things to bone but also their teeth can pierce stuff and you do see that so that particular object I wouldn't say it's particularly well accepted so what you're saying is hyenas play the flute. There's a whole band of flautists. Yeah but I don't know I don't see why they there wouldn't be some interest in rhythm okay for example you don't want to always go back to chimpers and primates as analogies but chimpanzees do sometimes get into drumming on tree buttresses and things like this and Neanderthals lives would have been surrounded by the rhythmic sound of flint knapping.

Well, late Neanderthals, 50,000 years ago, were obviously living at the same time as sapiens 50,000 years ago. Were sapiens definitely making music at that period? No. Well, perhaps, probably, in fact. The earliest instruments we have are about 35, something like that, bone flutes from Europe. But to have already created what is like a tonal instrument, quite a complicated concept, you do need to extrapolate backwards. So potentially

something was going on 50,000. Yeah, the question then is like, if we know that there was interaction physically to produce children and you end up with hybrid populations, that is the massive question. When we are talking about interbreeding, what was going on culturally? Was there cultural mixing? Was the interbreeding episodes we see,

were they like anomalies that happened and then the child went with one group or the other? Or were groups merging and was the actual full on cultural exchange? Do we know about sapiens and language? I mean, obviously, it's unlikely that it would have been consensual, lovely partnering off if one group had language and the other were grunting. Personally, with Homo sapiens and Neanderththals i think there had to be a commonality that was more than just like for for the amount of phases of interbreeding that we know happened

now it wasn't just like one time no it wasn't a one-night stand it's a no exactly it's a holiday romance didn't even talk about clitorises wow we didn't get the clitoris do neanderthals have different clitorises we don't know but I'm pretty sure they had them. But Neanderthal males did not have spiny penises. Unlike chimps. Wow, I mean, that's... Do they have penises like us? Well, we have quite large penises.

Well, speak for yourself. I mean, you know. Yeah. Yeah, chimps have like little bony, not bones, but like little weird nodule things that are called spines ribbed for her pleasure? bobbled for her pleasure

for inexperience no but they didn't have the gene for that as we don't have it so that's why they could interbreed presumably the plumbing was there and what we can see with like Neanderthals and other hominins as well, because you have this other unexpected hominin that came out from Siberia,

the Denisovans, and they were interbreeding with them as well. And what we're beginning to see basically is, although there probably was a tendency to stay within your cultural group sometimes, when there was the potential to interact, they went for it. They were not shy. And I think there has to be, they went for it. You know, they were not shy. And I think there has to be at least some of the time a cultural dialogue of some kind happening. Can I ask another weird, divergent question?

I know I'm not being funny. It's my job, but I'm too interested. Does our genetic, our genes want to diversify? It's very important genetically that we have, we're more diverse. Is our behavior driven by that genetic impulse are we inclined to go oh that's different i want to have sex with that because somewhere deep deep in our genetic profile our genes know that it's bad to shag our sister all the time uh well that is it yeah all the time with you just you can't play bone

flute with your sister that's an old hyena rule uh yeah i mean there's there's different angles at that when i've been writing about it i did end up having to go down like a bestiality research sort of rabbit hole um oh rabbit holes oh god i said that you know did we see them as animals i just don't think that's true but bestiality is actually pretty common across human society. That's what I'm resisting saying is surely it's just humans going, oh, I have sex with that. No, I think there's more than that. I think there was cuddles around the campfire.

And also that they're so strong, it might be quite hard for a sapien to overwhelm all the time. Yeah, there probably was a drive, a curiosity about each other. I don't think Neanderthals could have been as creative as they were with materials for example they were sort of i like to call them material connoisseurs because they're very particular about the kinds of stone wood animal bones that they use for their tools they're interested in experimentation that idea has changed that they just did the same old stuff for a hundred thousand years that's not true they were very experimental so i don't see why they wouldn't have an openness

i think discussions about how closed their society was to others that's tended to go with the chimpanzee model as in chimpanzees rather than bonobos and chimpanzees they do not like strangers they are aggressive they have like patrols around their territory and they'll batter and kill strangers sometimes. Bonobos don't do that or so much. They are much more open to other relations and their society is arranged very differently. They're not violent.

There's not like the same level. There's no infanticide and stuff like that. So they're completely different social structures. We don't know what kind of model Neanderthals had, but I don't see why it's always assumed to be the violent model when it could be more like bonobos. That's the pop culture legend. Because they're brutish.

Yeah, but that's been there from the beginning, that this idea that war and conflict was the baseline assumption of what interactions in the past would be like. But then they didn't have the knowledge that we have about interbreeding. So I think that's an interesting question. If we'd known from the beginning. Yeah. Would the myth, would it have developed like that?

Exactly. Maybe they were an extraordinarily cuddly people. Maybe they were unusually like, oh, you seem nice. Yeah. Anyone want to have sex? Bonobos, anyone but mum. Exactly. At some time.

Rabbit holes, everything. Anyway. anything yeah and they had art often that's a definition of of humanity to create to be expressive to to make things that are not functional they had art we believe or or is that still a challenging area i don't really like the word art oh okay yeah right okay i'll go home then i would prefer to talk about aesthetics okay there are some some cases and and my favorite one would be an italian site grotto fermani where you have a fossil shell so it's nothing to do with food it's been brought from a long way i think somewhere up to maybe 100 kilometers to this site and it has red pigment on it polished as if it's been sort of held or, you know, touched for a long time. So there's no real practical explanation for that object.

Could easily be jewellery. Exactly. All cultures have decorated themselves. Yes. It's unlikely that they didn't decorate themselves. Yeah. So art, no, but expressive aesthetics maybe yes well yeah and and the brunickel cave it's very very bizarre it's about 300 meters into a hill dark cave passages

large circle of broken stalagmite columns all formed into a circle um there's another little one and then there's some piles in the middle it's not natural it's not like cave bear bums shuffling around that's it's a formed thing and there's fires there's been intense burning in parts of that and it has kind of been sort of oh it's like the stonehenge of neanderthals bonehenge but if not if only were bones yeah exactly that kind of sounds like hyperbole but if you look at the research that was done on it it isn't just like stuff that they've shoved there is actually structure in it but why yeah we're back to the stonehenge episode again we don't understand and we don't know it's just yeah but it's not going to be a living site it's too deep in you would have you know have a problem

with illumination it's like it's masses of. It would have taken hours to create that. Wow. I mean, that's fun. 174,000 years old. That's very old. Very old. The only other thing I want to bring up actually here is cannibalism. Because we, I mean, we talk about Neanderthals as violent and whatever.

And cannibalism now rears its ugly head. Tim, how do you feel about cannibalism? Are you a pro, anti? I'm not too bothered by it. That's fine. I think it's good to? Are you pro, anti? I'm not too bothered by it. That's fine. I think it's good to be moderate. I'm open-minded. I'm a progressive. I'm happy to munch down on a fellow human

if they don't mind. If they've consented, you're okay. It's just a cultural thing. I eat all sorts of sentient animals. I mean, I wouldn't eat a human, and there's good reason not to, but I don't think any societies that ate humans are suddenly less human. Do we have evidence for the ends of cannibalism?

And do we think it's ritual practice or do we think it's just lunch? Yeah, we definitely do have some evidence. We have known that for a long time, actually. One of the first sites at the end of the 19th century, Kropina, obviously the bones had been chopped up and stuff. We don't actually have many sites where you have like full on chewing. So they were definitely being consumed. You do have some teeth marks, but it's not common. And there's not many sites where they were burning the bone either. There is a surprisingly large amount of sites where bodies were being processed, fully butchered, defleshed,

disarticulated, some scraping. Although it's not everywhere by any stretch, it's a lot more common than we used to think. Could they have had gods? And why wouldn't they have had gods? Everyone bloody does. And why wouldn't part of that be like sacrifice and chop up the thing and some tribute or... There's like a multiplicity of possibilities. How do you... I mean, the interesting question is the contrast with the whole bodies that you find. Like the whole question of burial and do they bury? There's an unarguable phenomenon of whole or nearly whole bodies,

adults through to infants. And that is a strange thing. That's not explicable through natural processes. You just don't find like whole hyenas or there's something going on they've protected the body somehow some kind of covering but if we expect them to be laid out in like a a christian style grave we're going to be disappointed because that's not what they were doing but that's our standards that we're trying to hold them to that standard it's all this sapien bias just because it doesn't look like the way we do well and who's we exactly

because yeah cultures all over the world today are are interested in in body parts and in keeping pieces of bodies and you know even like the whole cannibalism thing now that that is something that you do see in western culture some people have an urge to eat the ashes of their dead and they like that's they have it at Christmas dinner. No, seriously. Go to look on tabloids and stuff. It happens. It's this urge to make them part of you.

Tim, do you know why they're called Neanderthals? Neander Valley? Hey, hello. Look at him with his knowledge. Exactly right. Yeah, the Neander thing is really funny because Neander means new man, Valley. So it's just like this incredible coincidence. And it's in Germany, isn't it?

Yes, in the middle of the 19th century. But it wasn't the first Neanderthal found. There were other ones before that, but they weren't recognised. Right, OK, so this is the first time someone went, hang on a minute. Yes, one in Gibraltar in the 1840s. But that wasn't even the first one. There was another one in the 1830s that, again, was dug and nobody recognised it. And in 1865, Tim, do you know what is classified as a new idea?

I said John Lubbock becomes up with this idea, this notion. No, I don't think so. It's the Stone Age. So up to that point, the world is 6,000 years old. I mean, the biblical counting was 4004 BCE, was when the world began. And then suddenly they go, hang on, we think it's older. And so Lubbock comes up with the idea of a stone age,

a three-part stone age, which is Neolithic, Mesolithic, Paleolithic. You're the first person to propose older than 6,000 years. Yeah, I think people were, like, there was biblical calculations a lot earlier than that. But with the geologists, people had been slowly getting their heads around. Like Charles Lyell and people like that. Yeah, even before that, like in the late 18th century, people were really beginning to understand you couldn't get rock formations that happened like this without everything being desperately old. And that was kind of connecting with fossils that were coming out

and an understanding that forms were not necessarily fixed and they started to find transitional stuff. And there were even early primate fossils that were being found in the sort of early 19th century, but still, like, nobody expected the Neanderthals. You know, they were still a surprise. So much of this blows my mind. We, as a species, expect humans to just get super cool with not just 60,000 or 100,000, 200,000

years or 2 million years of hominids, but 14 billion years of universe. And we're just sort of all meant to be cool with that. And I'm very frustrated by people who don't get their heads around that, but maybe that's a bit unfair given there's only been about seven generations of humans who have known any of this. Well that's what I like about this period that at the same time they're finding the Neanderthals the first huge telescopes are kind of going

oh so those fuzzy things are other galaxies. And you have Darwin as well in 1859 is it? Exactly so like space is expanding time is going way back. So within three years, you discover Neanderthals, you identify that they are an ancient species. Darwin then goes, apes, chimps, us.

And then a few years later, someone goes, hang on, Stone Age. And then into space. So it's an amazing moment in history. Sort of five, ten years where the whole world and universe is being... People start talking about aliens at the same time the late 19th century i find that fascinating i don't think that's coincidence it's this kind of idea of where are we in the cosmos and who are we if we're just insignificant then what else is possible yeah the other thing that freaks me out is in my country the distance we're we've travelled and we are travelling too slowly in understanding that what we did in 1788

is walk into the oldest continuous culture that exists on the planet and decimate it and that that jumps back. So when I was growing up, firstly, we were told it was all peaceful and that the Brits are fantastic. And secondly, we were told that Aboriginal people had been in Australia for, I don't know,

I think it was 17,000 or whatever the year, which is still epic. But now it's 60. And we have this idea of Indigenous culture, of Aboriginal culture as if it's a thing. But in 60,000 years, nothing's a thing. 60,000 years is millions of things, generation after generation of change and all that.

The people who do have a continuous cultural link, including songlines that describe when the ocean was over the Nullarbor, like 15,000 year old stories that people know today. Those people who started off that culture lived at the same time as Neanderthals. Yeah. That's amazing, isn't it? It is. And we Brits just went, sort of. Yeah, we denied it.

I've got guns. But the discovery of Neanderthals also presumably folds into a sort of eugenics and racist ideas. The classification of what was the type human was a white male. Hello. Yes, that's me. Explicitly so. Not you. I am.

Not you, Greg. It was more like, well, me. Like you. Yeah. But you, Greg. It was more like, well, like you. Yeah, but no, it's true. And like at the time when there had already been this strong trend towards classifying living peoples all over the world in a way which very conveniently placed Western civilizations at the apex and so when Neanderthals and the fossils came out they were directly compared with chimpanzees but also with black people and specifically aboriginal peoples as well because they were regarded as the least evolved the most savage in that word of meaning like closer to animals so Neanderthals were basically part of the structures that were being drawn on from out of science to justify all of the colonial projects that was going on well into the 20th century and and you know so the impacts of all of that is still there in the

living populations. I was thinking about what would have happened if the sapien or the homo troop that got down through Asia to Australia had been Neanderthals and then the ocean had done what it did and that the population who stayed in Australia for 60,000 years what would that have looked like I guess the same that would have been extraordinary right well I think we know what we would have done we would yes decimated them the same way that we've done to our own people. We're very reliable that way. We really are. Yes, exactly.

But we're the First Nation Australians. There was language exchange and trade. And it didn't matter. We still did that. Yes, that's right. I mean, that's a whole other conversation about how that went wrong. Yeah. I do find it a bit worrying, like with the ethics and stuff of the gene editing research that's going on now and everything like that.

If somebody somewhere is going to put something Neanderthal into a human baby just to see. Although, have you seen California Man? Because it's a really fun film. And, you know, part of me is like, that would be fun. If like a nice age guy was defrosted and then he got to go to high school and hang out with the cool kids. The Pauly Shaw movie? It's got Brendan Fraser in it. I mean, it's fun. I mean, I Brendan Fraser in it. Yeah. It's fun.

I mean, I don't think it's scientific. It wasn't called California Man. I think it was, isn't it? It was called Encino Man. Oh, did it get released under a different title? I think it's California Man. It's called Encino Man. I haven't even seen it.

I think it's California Man in my head. We need a researcher here who knows something important. Get on Google IMDb, please. We want a real expert who knows about film. But, I mean, we've kind of alluded to the extinction of neanderthal in the in the fact that they they are no longer with us so actually that brings us to my favorite part of the podcast which is the nuance window the nuance window this is where our expert guest dr becky can fully geek out on neanderthals for two uninterrupted

minutes and you are talking about extinction, but not extinction. So I'll let you take it away. We already kind of touched on it, like assuming what does extinct actually mean? Where does that leave us? We've kind of discussed Neanderthals for so long as a different species. But if you look at the biological definition of species, it's to do with can you interbreed or can you not? And so we know, yes, we could definitely interbreed. Where does that kind of leave us with our standards as to what explains why we are here and why they disappear in the fossil record?

Like if I'm on a train or something, people will always ask me what happened to the Neanderthals. And that's the most difficult question to answer and I think there's going to be different things in different areas but there is something happening around 40,000 and the question is why did it take so long I think now that's the interesting change that we know Homo sapiens were in Eurasia so much more early than we used to believe. And why did we not appear to come into Europe? And yet there are still these sort of persistent narratives that we were the success story when they're not even really extinct.

They are still in us. You know, there's more Neanderthal DNA in living people than ever was sort of walking around as intact bodies. So yeah, I think I would like people to kind of consider what they think is extinct and what isn't. Some of the very early Homo sapiens that were in Eurasia, 50,000, 40,000, those lineages, some of them went nowhere either. So some of those groups are more extinct than the neanderthals in a sense so all super complicated but i think that's what's exciting now it's forcing us to redefine basic understanding of

what those populations were doing and what that means for what we feel about them thank you very much i love the idea of more extinct it's like you can't be a little bit pregnant. That's really fascinating. So they died out 40,000 years ago. They disappear from the fossil record, yes, about 40,000. And they're still with us in terms of genetic heritage. Yeah, so somewhere maybe between 20% to 50% of their genome is still around, but it's spread between different living populations.

So people from sub-Saharan ancestry will probably, as far as we can see at the moment, not have any. Europeans, which a long time ago we'd say, oh, Europeans will have the most. No, it's actually East Asian people, Native Americans, people from Polynesia, Australia, they have more. That is unexpected as well. And it's because there were these multiple phases

in different places of contact and in the general uh neanderthals largely were in eurasia that's their sort of zone of occupation yeah western eurasia like we we've got no evidence for them in like china it's difficult because without the fossils and the dna you can't really tell and i guess my old assumption was that sapiens came out of a line of slowly altering you know pre-human species and that each one knocked out the other by virtue of its evolutionary development but this parallel thing that we actually wiped neanderthals out because i suppose the same reason we want to wipe the other football team out because they were different

but they lived alongside us i'm absolutely fascinated by that the earliest anatomically modern-ish humans that we would put in homo sapiens you're talking sort of 300 000 years so that has got massively older than what it used to be and that's in africa neanderthals basically emerge as far as we can see in europe somewhere between 400 and 350 000 it's a lot older than it used to be. So Neanderthals were doing their thing. Did they have another subspecies of people that were also doing their thing that they replaced? Yeah, I mean, if you go right back now, the earliest dispersals of hominins coming out of

Africa, because we still believe that's the oldest place where we find any hominins, you're talking more like 2 million years now. Okay, that's way back. Out into Eurasia. So you have people well over a million in Europe and in East Asia. What were they called the first month to move out of Africa? Basically, they're varieties of Homo erectus, but they might get called slightly different things if they're in Asia versus Africa. Then, if I remember my college degree that's now out of date, Homo heidelbergensis?

Yeah. So the idea basically now is that you have these extremely early dispersals of people. You would have what's called Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis, but we're not quite sure as to exactly how they possibly interacted. But they definitely, more archaic groups, gave rise to the Neanderthals in Europe. We can see that with genetics. Do we have a definite common ancestor? I mean, obviously we have a common ancestor, but do we know what that was, the common ancestor between us and Neanderthals? Depending on which genetics you choose to sort of go with it. I'm glad there's

choice in this picture. Too much choice. It's somewhere between sort of 800 to 600,000, probably in Africa, that that would be an even more ancient population. And we're assuming that, again, there must have been multiple phases of dispersals coming out in order for that group to end up in Europe. This is the thing I find fascinating. My degree is 15 years old and all of it is wrong. And the stuff moves so fast. Just the past decade. It's incredible how much has been... Archaeologists keep finding more stuff. Damn it.

Damn. Tim, you asked this question early on and Ichaeologists keep finding more stuff. Damn it. Damn. Tim, you asked this question early on and I paused it. So let's have at it. Why aren't they here anymore? Could it be guns, germs and steel? I mean, is it... I know it's not because it's much earlier than guns, but is it disease and war and greater technology?

I don't necessarily think it's war. There has just been a paper out saying perhaps what kept Homo sapiens out of Europe for a long time was the regional pathogens that were here. And eventually we managed to break through the disease barrier and come in. But there's no evidence for that as a reason. But yeah, I mean mean there does have to be something the climate at that time between 50 000 to 40 000 was not that extreme compared to what

they had survived before i think it's probably to do with different aspects of mobility where they were moving but also probably something to do with social connectivity. So we can see occasional long-distance connections across the landscape for Neanderthals. So you would have a stone tool in your site and that came originally from 100 kilometres away but there's not very many of them in any given site. But when you look at what was going on with Homo sapiens, they have more of these long-distance things.

Neanderthals were a tiny population. There weren't heaps and heaps of them. Yeah. And their troops were small, so they interbred and potentially had a lot of problems with lack of genetic diversity. Do we have enough Neanderthal DNA so that the maths adds up that they just sort of got bred out,

that the successful ones bred with sapiens yes and no i mean like the the small population thing uh has shifted a little bit they definitely lived in small groups but i think that's the case for everyone at this at that time so the people that were coming in their record doesn't look any more substantial in terms of the group size not really but the connectivity between them might be so they may have had is that language do you think is it that humans may be just a i don't know better conversationalists it might just be more that they were more prone to maintain long distance group contacts um or maybe they're swapping stones they're swapping semen and then well i mean in my culture if you're going to give someone a spearhead, it only means one thing. Is that what you call it?

Yeah. But it might come down to something like we just were a bit more rabbit-y. We had babies more often. For me, it's not a coincidence that they sort of did their thing for a very long time in a lot of challenging situations. And then we rock up. Yeah, we rock up. We're in Eurasia from at least 100,000 in the Near East, 170. So we're around for a long time, but not in Europe, in their heartland, as far as we can see.

So that's the question. Why did it take so long for the presence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia to actually have some kind of massive impact. All right, then. So, in conclusion, huh. We need more data. We need way more data. So what do you know now? Well, we have reached more or less the end of the pod,

which means it's time to test our comedian, Tim. Are you feeling quizzy? Do you feel quizzical? Yes, I'm always up for stumbling over quizzes. You will hear ten questions we've heard answers to. But it's been a tricky technical one, so I'm not going to judge you at all if this doesn't go as well as planned. There are 60 seconds. There are ten questions. I'm a generous marker, but I do have the right answers written down.

I feel a huge amount of pressure. Okay, all right, here we go. Question number one. When do we think the endotels may have become extinct, if we accept extinction as an idea? 40,000 years ago. Yes. Where did they live, generally speaking, in terms of continents? Eurasia.

Yes, two points. Okay, when were the endotel bones first discovered, in which decade? 1856. Oh, hello. In which year was the concept of a Stone Age first proposed? I think you said 65. Four out of four. What species are we, modern humans?

Homo sapiens. Yes, five out of five. Name one of the materials Neanderthals used to make tools. Stone. Yes, that's fine. Name another one. Shells. Yeah, I mean, you're doing very well.

Maybe. Yes. Name one other species which overlapped with Neanderthals besides us. Homo hildebergensis? Yes, very good. You could also have had Homo denisovan. I always thought it was Denisovan. Yeah, either is fine.

I don't know if they've been given a homo. Named after Denis, whoever he is. The question eight, roughly how much Neanderthal DNA do we have? Two to four percent. Two percent is pretty much bang on. What did Neanderthals make in the Bruniquel cave in France that was unusual? A circle of stalactite pieces. Nine out of...

This could be a flawless run here. Question ten, some people think Neanderthals play the bone flute, not a penis. What is the more likely scenario? Probably hyenas just happen to do some good regular bites. That is a 10 out of 10 flawless score. Very impressive. Very, very impressive. Not bad for someone with 7% Neanderthal.

I'm special. Really fascinating conversation. Usually on this podcast, we know the answers to all the questions. On this one, it's really amazing just to sort of fly blind a little bit and just go off the tiny amount of data we do have and sometimes it's so useful the data sometimes it's so revealing and sometimes there are more questions that come with

it it's astonishing what we can do with the material that we have now it's amazing in 20 years it'll all be different oh yeah oh two in two years i mean it's cumulative yeah i love it i love it it's been a pleasure to have you both here do you feel like you know the neanderthals better Oh, in two years? It's cumulative, yeah. I love it, I love it. It's been a pleasure to have you both here. Do you feel like you know the Neanderthals better now? Definitely, yes. Do you feel like you'd hang out with them? Yeah, it'd be so good.

Do you think? It'd be really weird if they were much closer to us species. Do you think we could jam with them? Do you reckon they'd sort of enjoy your stuff, your music leave? I think unless you're a proper word nerd, you don't like my stuff, even if you're a sapien. So, you know, I reckon they would have liked my drama. That's about fair enough. Rhythm is a universal thing, isn't it? Yeah. He's got a strong forehead.

I think we proved Neanderthals were not brutish or dim, but they were perhaps somewhat enigmatic and mysterious. We're hoping to learn more about them. Cuddly cannibals. And more importantly, we've learned that the film California Man was known as Encino Man in Australia and America, but in Europe and New Zealand, it was California Man. So we're both right. No.

No. I refuse. It's Encino Man. Fine. It's time to say goodbye i'm gonna say huge thanks to my two guests in prehistory corner dr rebecca rag sykes who's a fellow at the university of bordeaux and in comedy corner the incomparable tim minchin who's just a jolly good fellow thanks to you listeners at home for sticking with us i know it got a bit technical at times but hopefully you've

learned lots of things obviously this is podcast so so tell your friends leave a review online subscribe do all the things you're meant to do the show is called You're Dead to Me but for now I think we are done I'm off to go and

punch a cave hyena and learn to play a bone flute bye You're Dead to Me was a Maruniz media production for BBC Radio 4 the script was by

Emma Magoose and myself the project manager was Isla Matthews and the producer was Cornelius Mendes BBC Sounds music radio podcasts and myself, the project manager was Isla Matthews and the producer was Cornelius Mendes. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

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