You're Dead to Me - Neanderthals (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: November 21, 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 Neanderthals. Just who were the Neanderthals? Were they the squat caveman we’ve come to know in pop culture or have we misunderstood them entirely? Join the team as we discover there is so much more to those handsome, hench beings who walked the Earth before us.

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. Hiya, Greg here. Hope you're doing alright. We are making Series 3 right now. In the meantime, we've been making these Radio 4 versions of the previous episodes. We are putting them in the feed here permanently. They will be alongside the long versions. So make sure you scroll down and choose which version you want.

So you can have the shorter, punchier, swear-free versions or the long, rambling, sweary versions. Up to you. Thanks very much for listening. Take care. Bye. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history, and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You may have heard my Radio 4 series Homeschool History, although that was for the kids. Today, we're 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, I'm delighted to say I'm joined by two very special guests. In Prehistory Corner, she's a Paleolithic archaeologist who is an expert in prehistoric tools. She's the author of a brilliant new book called Kindred, all about Neanderthals. Lucky old us, it's the wonderful Dr Becky Ragsykes. Hi Becky, how's it going? 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 Tim Minchin.

Hello. Hello. 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 a new technique. I mean, because I was thinking radiocarbon is only useful up to about 50,000. So you can have a slightly 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 haven't thought about us. So, I mean, hopefully by the end of this of them. That's what I'm saying. I think they're selfish. I think they're very self-centred. 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 So What Do You Know? This is where I guess what listeners at home might know about the subject. 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, ugh, 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? Let's find out. Tim, is that how you think of a Neanderthal? Is that, you know, that kind of description of

thuggish and violent and brutish? I suppose I probably did until I started really nerding out on science 10 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. 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. I'm thinking Peter Stringfellow.

Are they? Hopefully not. I mean, maybe not. He's looking at me. Maybe not 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 my job i know with big once. 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 livingestyles 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 is it a bit of both? It's both. I think people would say they're not like Arctic tundra specialists in the way that an Arctic fox is. They can cope with colder climates than now. So think about like Siberia.

So like Sunderland, really cold. with colder climates than now. So think about like Siberia. So like Sunderland, really cold. Yeah, 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. Neanderthals skipping through the buttercups. Yeah, they probably got sunburned even in the glacial periods, you know. And Tim, what's your guess on brain size in terms of the skull capacity? Well, 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 language centres and stuff that we have. 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 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? Because our brain plasticity...

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 for language because their brains evolved to be like that. But it's also that language made their brains look like that more. But 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 you know we're not really sure when we spoke to you before you said that one of the end of all reconstructions looks like daniel craig and i was like 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 neanderthals hot are they i mean are they sort you know, 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 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 and there's a lovely pairing at Gibraltar

of a female and a child and you know know, they're standing there hugging. They would have done gags, I reckon. Well, that's it, isn't it? It's very, like, I mean, primates do gags and find them funny. You know, this is the thing when we grow up thinking of cavemen. They would have loved and shown off 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.

They're 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's from a bbc documentary i don't know if you've ever seen this tim 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 uh see what your reaction is just pitch up your voice one 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. Now let's make a sound, just let's make a huge R. Rrrr! And again. Rrr No! And again. No!

I mean, it makes sense that they would have loud, boomy voices, but just the idea of being so shrill. But I'm in Chimpsco. They do. I mean, it's like the idea that, oh, they were big and hench, and therefore they were, like, bashing and everything. They had fine motor control as well, so I'm sure they could whisper

to each other. One, two, three. One, two, three. Darling. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how that pairs up with Dr. Becky's come to bed eyes. Come to bed. What do you think about that theory? I don't know about the precise sort of modeling of 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. 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 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, is it 2% to 4% of our DNA?

More like 2%, not quite as high as the initial estimates. So 2% of Tim's DNA is Neanderthal. I'd say it'd be more with me. two to four percent of our dna more like two not quite as high as the initial so two percent of tim's dna is neanderthal i'd say be more with me but 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 um it's on my business 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 in the end, that one's hot. Daniel Craig, that one. 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 Neanderthals, I think there had to be a commonality that was more than just like four. 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. 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. 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 100,000 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 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 you know that's the pop culture legend the idea of them yeah and but that's been there from the beginning that this idea that 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, exactly. Maybe they were an extraordinarily cuddly people. Maybe they were unusually like, oh, you seem nice. And they had art. Often that's a definition of humanity, to create, to be expressive, to make things that are not functional.

They had art, we believe, or is that still a challenging area? I don't really like the word art. Oh, OK. Or me neither. Right, OK. I'll go home then. I would prefer to talk about aesthetics. OK.

There are some cases, and my favourite one would be an Italian site, Grotto Fumane, 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 kilometres 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 exactly all cultures have decorated themselves so yes yeah 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 metres into a hill, dark cave passages, large circle of broken stalagmite columns all formed into a circle.

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. 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 which bonehenge but 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 stone it would have taken hours to create that. Wow. I mean, that's fun. 174,000 years old. That's very old. Could they have had gods? Oh my gosh. Why wouldn't they have had gods? Everyone 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... The interesting question is the contrast with the whole bodies that you find. The whole question of burial

and do they bury? There's an unarguable phenomenon of whole or nearly whole bodies, adults through to infants. 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 bodies somehow. Some kind of covering. But if we expect them to be laid out in like 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. 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 It's a lovely coincidence

Coincidence, yeah 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, okay So this is the first time someone went Hang on a minute Yes, one in Gibraltar the ant hole found there were other ones before that but they weren't recognized right okay so this is the first time someone went hang on a minute yes one in gibraltar and the 1840s but

that wasn't even the first one there was another one in the 1830s that again was dug and nobody recognized it and in 1865 tim do you know what is classified as a new idea by sir john lubbock it comes up 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. It's basically, 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. He's the first person to propose older than 6 000 years yeah i think people were like there was the 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 um 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 two 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. 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 you discover neanderthals you identify that they are an ancient species

darwin then goes apes chips us yeah and then a few years later someone goes hang on stone age yeah and then into space so it's an amazing moment in history yeah sort of five ten years where the whole world and universe 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 what 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 traveled and we are traveling too slowly in understanding that what we did in 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 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 that it is and we and we brits just went no yeah we denied i've got guns but

the discovery of neanderthals also presumably folds into a sort of eugenics and racist ideas the classification of the what was the type human was a white male um hello yes that's me explicitly so not you i am not you greg it was more like well like you yeah um but no it's true and 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, 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 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 have decimated them the same way that we've done to our own people.

We're very reliable that way. We really are. 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.

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-aged guy was defrosted and then he got to go to high school and hang out with the cool kids paulie shaw movie uh it's got brendan fraser in it i mean it's it's it's fun i mean i don't think it's california man that was called

encino man oh did it get released under a different title it's called encino man 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 fact that they are no longer with us. So, actually, that brings us to my favourite 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. 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. I guess my old assumption was that sapiens came out of a line of slowly altering 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. Well, I feel I've learned loads here. I've had a brilliant time and hopefully so have you. A huge thank you again to our truly magnificent guests in Prehistory Corner, Dr Becky Rag Sykes, and in Comedy Corner corner the incomparable tim minchin and of course thanks to you listeners for joining us and getting to know all things neanderthal i'm now off to go and punch a cave hyena in its stupid face and maybe play my bone From BBC Radio 4, a new series from Intrigue, Mayday.

On November 11th, 2019, James LeMessurier was found dead in Istanbul. He was the ex-British army officer who helped set up the White Helmets in Syria. Ordinary people trained to save civilians in the aftermath of bomb attacks. The biggest heroes in an ugly war. But lots of people here in the UK say all the White Helmets videos are staged. Part of the greatest hoax in history. I'm Chloe Hedgermetho and I've spent the last year investigating the White Helmets and James LeMessurier. Who they are, who he was and why he died.

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