Neanderthals: Death of a Human Species

a shrine Delta. It was a classy show featuring a panoply of commentators, and I was one of them, pondering complex topics like nineteen eighties hospital dramas, saying elsewhere it was and our long drama. It starred Mark Harman as doctor Bobby Caldwell. Comedian and actor Michael Ian Black was another contributor. I thought, if anything, the title That's Incredible, it was an understatement of how incredible the things on

That's incredible work. We didn't really know each other back then, but I distinctly remember his take on the nineteen eighty one Neanderthal epic Quest for Fire. While most of us were obsessed with the film's nudity, Michael took the high road. I was really looking at it more from an anthropological point of view than to see ray Don Jones tatas. And it's that prehistory that's our subject this episode. Since Quest for Fire, we've learned some stunning truths about Neanderthals,

and I knew who. I wanted to discuss this topic with my friend Michael ian Black back when we were loving the eighties. Neither of us knew just how connected he is to our human cousins of four thousand decades ago. If they had told me only how much Neanderthal I am, I would have paid twice the amount for the test. I'm mo Rocca. And this is mobituaries. This mobit Neanderthals circa forty thousand years ago, death of a human species. Okay, first,

let's take care of some basics. The name Neanderthal comes from the neander Valley in Germany, where one of the first Neanderthal skulls was found in eighteen fifty six. At the time, the fossil was misidentified as the skull of a Cossack soldier from the Napoleonic Wars. They were only off by a few tens of thousands of years now, Neanderthals were also human, but a separate species Homo sapiens. That's us and Neanderthals did share a common ancestor over

half a million years ago. Almo sapiens would go on to flourish in Africa, while Neanderthals roamed across Europe and Asia, adapting to a cold or harsher climate. Eventually the two species did meet up. Then, about thirty to forty thousand years ago, Neanderthals disappeared without a trace, or so we thought, which brings me to my guest, Michael ian Black. So, Michael Ian Black, thank you so much for joining me for this whole episode. My pleasure. Let's get the promotion

out of the way first, because it's deserved. Your podcast, How to Be Amazing is amazing. Yes, you can be on it. No, yes, I think that's where I was going. So years ago I interviewed you about your one of your books, Naval Gazing, and in it you talked about genetic testing and why did you go about investigating your genetic makeup? I think the same reason most people do, just curiosity. I just wanted to know genetically speaking, who

I am. I had it in my head that I must be at least a pastiche of things, some kind of milange. I was hoping to find some African Americans, some Native American but the results were so disappointingly kind of exactly what I had been led to believe, which is that I am a hundred percent Ashkenazi Jew. I do think the food is better than Sephardic food. Delicious, delicious if you just take the gafiltha fish out of that which I have always associated and will always associate

with just jellied cat turns. But but you say you found out you were one hundred percent Ashkenazic Jew. But that's not quite right. Well, it is in terms of ethicity. But there was also a marker which I didn't know till I got it back from the company that says it will also tell you your Neanderthal percentages. If they had told me only how much Neanderthal I am, I would have paid twice the amount for the test, because for some reason, that just really captured my imagination to think, oh,

I may be part of an entirely different species. Right. That was thrilling to me, And I didn't know that they had developed the test, and I found out that I am two point nine percent Neanderthal, which is greater than the norm. The average is a two point seven percent. Okay, that's a significant difference. I mean, I can't tell you how delighted I was to hear this, because your listeners can't see me, but you can probably tell by the way I speak in the timber of my voice that

I am not the most masculine of fellows. But I was going to say, I mean, I mean, I'm tolerant, but to a point. But just the popular image of the Neanderthal as a lumbering brute, as this strong survivor out on the steps end planes just thrilled me to no end. And so I was delighted. And I told my wife that I am above averagely Neanderthal, and she said, that's why you look like that, and she did not mean it as a compliment. And let me just say

that Martha is highly evolved. She's basically Darryl Hannah and Clanta the Cave Bear, a highly evolved, leggy blonde. Yes she is, but wait, wait, hold on, When you describe Neanderthals as masculine, lumbering brutes. You're making certain assumptions, and we'll dispel some of these in this episode. For instance, how do we know there weren't cultured, epicy Neanderthals? Well, I think we do know now you are doing the research. And I'm just speaking off the top of my head.

Now they were conness of fine wine, is my understanding. They did puppet shows. Oh, Michael, We've got some work to do. Think of me as your Henry Lewis Skates and this is finding your roots, or as your Lisa Kudrow and this is who do you think you are? I think that's her show. I want you to know that your Neanderthal ancestors were pretty darned special and not as different from us normal people as you may think. So how did they get such a bad rap? Let's

find out. I grew up with so many classic TV shows and films about Neanderthals and cavemen, and they pretty much all got it wrong. In nineteen eighty one, there was the aforementioned Quest for Fire. The characters basically just plump through the whole movie, except when one of them gets beamed in the head by a rock and then everyone laughs. That same year, moviegoers were subjected to the

ringo star vehicle Caveman. During the course of the movie, a bunch of bumbling cavemen discover fire, how to light farts on fire, and jam bands and who could forget the mel Blanc voiced cartoon character. But as far as portrayals of the primordial go the show that had the biggest impact on me was Land of the Lost. The theme song told the story of the series. It's about a family on a river rafting trip. During the ride, they go down a magical waterfall and enter a universe

filled with dinosaurs and cave creatures. Hi, I'm Phil Paley and I played Chocca on the seventies show Land of the Lost. You were only nine years old when he got this role. Tell us about the character. Chaca was the youngest of the pacoony clan. What do you think he is? Who kind of a came in a monkey or what? Chaca? I wore a prosthetic headpiece, so it had a very prominent brow and forehead, so it did

kind of look neanderthal ish. I guess back when I watched the show, I kind of assumed Chocca was a Neanderthal. But looking back at the clips. Now he seems more monkey boy free all over, except for his face. The suit was made out of like nylon pantyhose material with a real human hair hand sewn into it, so it made it kind of itchy. Luckily, there are some people who know the difference between Saturday Morning science fiction and

real science. Anything that depicts Neanderthals as basically bad hair, that's what I laugh about. Professor John Hawks from the University of Wisconsin at o'claire is one of the world's leading experts on Neanderthals. Why have Neanderthals had such a bad reputation. The Neanderthals are a group that doesn't have

an advocacy. They don't have a lobby. You know, there's there's not Neanderthal representatives calling their congressman and so as a consequence, if you thought something bad about the past, you know, they were a convenient group because they weren't going to complain. It's so easy to use Geico dot com. A caveman could do it. What not cool? I did not know you were there. The Neanderthals in those Geico commercials might be funny, but make no mistake, we're laughing

at them. So how did this stereotyping of Meanderthals as brutish, howling and stupid get started? John Hawkes says it may have begun with a nineteenth century German biologist named Ernst Heckel, who attempted to map a genealogical tree of all living things. When he came to early versions of us, he had no fossils to study. It was pretty much just guesswork. He chose a rather insulting classification. The name that he had for the predecessor of humans that would be the

Neanderthals basically was Homo stupidus. Yes, Homo stupidest. But it was the French who really gave Neanderthals a bad name. A nineteen oh eight, a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton was found in a cave in the town of La Chapelle. Ausan paleontologist Marcel Boule analyzed the remains of this individual and made sweeping and hugely influential assumptions about the entire species.

The image that came of his work was hairy and pretty ape like, with splayed toes and a slouching, hunched posture. Kate Wong is a writer for Scientific American and what researchers later determined was that this was an older individual, this Nandertal, who had suffered from severe arthritis. So all of the sort of features that led Bull to assume that the species had these slouched, stooped traits were actually the result of disease. That is really hilarious to me,

isn't it wild? And I've wondered about that before, Like, when you find an individual species of something, what if you're finding a weird member of that species and it turns out that's exactly what happened with the Neanderthals. Totally an agreement, fascinating and hilarious. But hold on, there's more. The old Man of La Chapelle, as he came to be known, became the public's picture of Neanderthals for generations.

They were the arcotopical cave people, and that image unfold she has stuck with the Neandertos over one hundred years later. Professor Chris Stringer, the research leader at the Natural History Museum in London, tells me part of the problem was that in the early twentieth century we didn't understand how evolution worked. There was this rather simplistic idea that they would be missing links to be found in the story

of human evolution. And it was because we were so fixated on the idea of a missing link that we typecast Neanderthals into the role of a half ap half human caveman duke. But thanks to the rapid advancement and the study of archaic humans, the image of the Neanderthal is finally changing. To be sure, Neanderthals were different from us in appearance. The pronounced brow ridge and sloping forehead in those Geico commercials weren't tramped up by make up.

Our nests, so our brain case shape is rather globular, sometimes described as like a soccer ball. The Neanderthal cranial shape was longer and lower. In fact, the Neanderthal brain was bigger than ours, as was the Neanderthal schnaz. We guessed that the whole nose would have been broader. They certainly seem to have had a nose that was capable of very very heavy breathing. It may also have served a function of warming up and humidifying the air when

they were living in relatively colder and drier conditions. They were starkier too, with rib cages that flared out and shorter limbs better for conserving heat. But recent studies on the Neanderthal thorax suggest that they might have walked even more upright than we do. As for what they sounded like, Neanderthal voices might have been higher pitched than ours. Listen to this simulation from the BBC. Let's just add a bit of nasal, now push into me. This is actually

getting him right into his body. Now speak. No, that isn't a monty python sketch. It's a serious demonstration. But aside from the physical, what's really surprising is how on par Neanderthals were with us cognitively and creatively. They made a lot of the same kinds of tools they had fire, They decorated their bodies with jewelry made from shells, eagle talons,

animal teeth, all sorts of fabulous accouterment. Some of these discoveries of them using feathers systematically and collecting predominantly the feathers of very dark black birds. We talk about it as Neanderthal goth because it seems like they preferred these dark raptors and dark crows and ravens and that sort of thing. Some signists speculate that Neanderthals saw power in these dark birds and thought they'd be imbued with that

power if they wore those feathers. And if you're picturing share in Bob Backy at the nineteen eighty six Oscars, I am too. And within just the past few years researchers found the first ever Neanderthal cave paintings and etchings, which reveal in early interest in social media. There's a great place in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar that has this what we call the Neanderthal hashtag because it looks like that pound sign that is scratched onto the floor of

the cave. What it means, what it meant to them, we have no idea, but it shows us some sign from the past that these were thinking beings. They were conveying something through their use of markings, through their use of ornaments, and that something was social. It was something about what they had to say to other individuals, what they had to communicate about themselves. And when it came to hunting, Neanderthals were pretty crafty. To attach tips to

their spears, they made their own glue. In order to do that, you have to take birch bark and smoke it down, reduce it at high temperature so that the sap inside of it condenses into this sticky pitch and that in the end makes a very very tiny amount of this. So you've got to do this many times to concentrate it. Neanderthals managed that process. If I had to assign an engineering class to figure out how this was done, they would have a hard time of it.

All to say that Neanderthals weren't the least bit stupidest, and neither was Choca. And the Pecuni had a language. It was developed by a UCLA language professor by the name of Victoria Frankin. After all these years, Philip Paley can still say some phrases in Paku. Well, these are classic ones. Bungu sarissa taka and that means beware of slee stack with an important warning very and uh. There's also oh ganza bisasa what does that mean? Big magic?

I love? Who doesn't love big magic? And we're back with Michaele and Black talking about what it really means to be Meanderthal. But I mean they were capable of language that we we we learned that right right. I thought you were just belching. No, No, I was just grunting in the Neanderthal Neanderthal like way. Right. We should have done that at the top of the episode. So there are two different ways to do it. I like saying Meandrewthal. There are some people that will say Neandrew Tall.

So you are welcome. You can go back and forth. You can switch over to neander Tall if you want. I am now forevermore going to pronounce it Neander Tall. Okay, so that's this scud. We're going to do a split on this, and I'm going to stick with Neanderthal. You stick with me Andrew Tall, and then everybody will be satisfied. Yeah. Did you like Land of the Loss? I loved it. There were these sid and Marty Croft shows, and in my memory, that was the only tolerable one, Right, I

loved it. Yeah. I'm older than you are, so when I watched it, I could tell it was pretty cheaply done. But I liked the opening credits. That's what I like, because it just seemed really exciting. Yeah, to me, there was nothing cheap about it. It was as real as well. Get rewatching a little bit of Captain Caveman that cartoon. I remember that I was kind of attracted to Captain Caveman.

I there was something, maybe it was I don't know anyway, And now when I go back and look at it, I think it's kind of weird because he looks like a testicle basically. Well, then that explains your attraction. Thank you. So so, Michael. Now that we've established that Neanderthals were intelligent and surprisingly similar to modern humans, that raises the question why did Neanderthals go extinct? Now there are various theories on this. First up, Professor Michael stab Vasser from

the University of Cologne in Germany. My speciality is a subject called isotope geochemistry. Oh, he's got my old position. That's what I did exactly. It is awkward for you. No, no, no, okay, I mean so I asked him what he actually does. It's almost like you're a weatherman for the ancient times. Yes, you could say that. Yes, he didn't really like that line, as he could tell anyway. He thinks it's climate change

that did in the Neanderthals. By studying stalagmites in caves, he determined that during their last fifty thousand years on Earth, the average temperature in the Danube Valley, one of the places where Neanderthals lived, was much colder than it is now. It was about thirty nine degrees fahrenheit. But and this is crucial, during that period, there were these cold snaps that would ultimately seal their fate. They lasted something between

a century and a millennium on average. They usually led to temperature drops which could be up to let's say, six to eight degrees today. It may not sound drastic, but it makes the difference between being able to grow crops or not, and if you can't eat, you're going to die. And then as climate recovered, modern humans basically resetted an empty area more or less. So he isn't saying that modern humans were better adapted to these cold

temperatures in the Neanderthals. I think the point he's making is that the extinction of Neanderthals was pretty much bad timing, wrong place, wrong time. But they had existed for millennia up until this point, and the average temperature as it's going down could have forced them south into warmer climates. But it seems like it didn't do that. I know, I don't know why. This feels like a very dumb theory, which is why we have another theory for you on

why Meanderthals died off. Okay, good, You remember Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London. He thinks the small population of Neanderthals was essentially swallowed up by modern humans. Some experts estimate that atops there were only about fifteen nous in Neanderthals spread all across Eurasia. There just weren't

that many of them. The Neandersals were relatively low in numbers, and I think that it probably wouldn't have taken much to push them over the edge to extinction, and maybe the appearance of modern humans as a competitor was sufficient to do that. But of course that's just a guess. Yeah, well, that just sounds like the most likely explanation. There was a sharknado of humans that came in and just wiped him out. I mean, we have a habit of doing that. That's kind of what we do. It's who we are.

But who we are isn't who we used to think we are. Doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo. Of course, Neanderthals aren't really gone. They live in you Michael and so many others. Let's find out what that means today. What does it mean to have within our genetic code a certain percentage of Neanderthal DNA? I wanted to find out, so I'm heading to New Jersey to talk to one of the foremost experts in the field.

My name is Josh Aki, and I'm a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the Lewis Sigler Institute for integrif Genomics at Princeton University. And you do that all in one breath. With twenty three and me, we can discover where in the world your DNA comes from. An unforgettable gift my heritage DNA, What are your kid At ancestry dna dot com. I spoke to Professor Ak

about what these DNA kits can tell us. It's one thing to find out that from one of these mail order things that you're ten percent Irish, ten percent Mediterranean, you know, five percent African. But to find out that your two point five percent Meandrethal, that's a whole other

level of self discovery. We've always said that our genomes are a mosaic of different ancestors, and I think what we've learned more recently is it's a mosaic of both recent ancestors and very distantly related different types of human ancestors. Before we could get to know what Neanderthal DNA looked like, we had to truly understand our own DNA. More than a thousand researchers across six nations have revealed nearly all

three billion letters of our miraculous a code. That was President Bill Clinton back in the year two thousand announcing the first time the human genome was sequenced. Then in two thousand and six, Swedish scientist Savante Papa and his team embarked upon sequencing the Neanderthal genome in a positively Jurassic Parkian way. They were able to isolate ancient DNA

directly from a Neanderthal femur bone. So they drill into the longbone and loud to a whole bunch of cleanup procedures to try to make sure that you're just getting Neanderthal DNA hall from this femur bone. Amazing. Once we sequenced the Neanderthal genome, we were able to recognize that we have what is called archaic DNA within our own genes. And this bombshell told us a lot about what Neanderthals and modern humans were doing with one another about forty

to fifty thousand years ago. It's been interestingly one of the most hotly contested issues in science for thirty years, with people arguing either there was admixture that happened between Neanderthals and modern humans or there wasn't. He's talking about sex, and recent studies suggest that they add mixed a lot. Okay, So where did the modern humans in the Neanderthals end up hooking up? That's a great question and something we

still don't know precisely. It seems to make most sense that the initial rounds of hybridization happened shortly after modern humans dispersed out of Africa. So maybe in Asia, minor like in Turkey, modern levront of like in Syria and Jordan. Yeah, okay, so it was a Middle Eastern that's where they got together. That's yes. And I can't help but imagine it. I mean in kind of a literal way. I mean, fifty thousand years ago, modern humans coming out of Africa and

meeting a group of Neanderthals. Yeah, and what was that interaction? Like what was the interaction with did the modern human guy walk over to the female neanderthal and were they saying like, stop, no, don't do it, She's not our kind. There's so much we don't know, but we're learning more every day thanks to Professor Aiki and his team. He took me on a tour of their facility. So we're going to go look at the experimental and computational space

in the Lewis Sigler Institute. You had to wear aaron at um. No, we're not going to be baking, but don't touch anything, okay. Mostly so these are my graduate students pretending like they're working. This is all right, nice to MITYA thesis project is on understanding how Neanderthal sequence is distributed across the human genome. When you walk down the street, do you ever sort of wonder the knee anderthal content of different people. I'm actually really good at

picking that out just by looking at you. Yeah, how much Neanderthal do you think is in me? Brush back your hair a little bit. I think you're about one percent. Okay, So my friend Michael Ian Black is two point nine percent Neanderthal. He's an exceptional case. It's amazing had a picture. Wait,

let me just show you a picture of it. Look at that to look at him, Yeah, I can definitely see yeah, because he's got a small chin, and Neanderthals are known for being relatively chinless, which is why I think you're a lower because you have a nice, strong chin, thank you. And he also has this sort of backward sloping foreheads, which is also very um yeah, what we're referred to as like archic. I don't feel like I have a very weak chin. I don't have a we

don't have a clapped to deskue chin. I've never felt the need to beard myself. You objectively do not have a weak chin. But I do have a reverse sloping forehead. He was right about that. But Tode's Roger Stone and he's gorgeous. All right, all right, one out of two. Let's get back to the beast. After meeting with grad student Aaron, Professor Age set the record straight. Just because someone has a lot of Neanderthal DNA doesn't mean his

or her physical appearance will reflect this. One of the dirty secrets still about genetics is that we are not very good at interpreting DNA sequence variation. So if I look at my friend Michael and I see certain features that may look like a rendering of a Neanderthal. That's just a coincidence. It is most likely just a coincidence. Most like you're leaving a little bit of room there. We can never say things with a certainty and science

that's hysterical. All right, let's go downstairs because that's where the fun toys are. This feels like the movie Coma, Remember Coma. This is an aluminum high twenty five hundred instruments. So this is one of the class of next generation sequencers. You don't have to have large, intact fragments of DNA. You can sequence from the small degraded fragments that most Neanderthal ancient DNA exists in because it degrades over time

and you can sequence a lot of it. Knowing what we do about Neanderthal DNA put the science fiction part of my brain in full geek out mode. In our lifetime, will we be able to see, you know, kind of a living, breathing Neanderthal that's created in a lab. The technology to do so arguably exist today. You can have like a version of Sturbridge Village or Williamsburg, Virginia, just a town with all Neanderthals building tools and grunting at each other. I think it will ultimately be decided that

that's an unethical thing to do. Good, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. But what does that Neanderthal DNA mean for us today? According to Professor Ake, one of the benefits modern humans got from mating with Neanderthals was it improved their immune systems. It was a very efficient way for our ancestors to quickly adapt to these new conditions was to have sex with the neanderthal and just pick up a few beneficial

genes from the Anderthals. Great, okay, but you don't get the benefits just from the sacks off. Your kids will get it. Yes, yeah, it's a persistent benefit. I almost never get sick per neanderthal thing. Yes, almost never. I can't remember the last time I was sick. Wow, And you have kids, have kids and the whole thing. I never get the flu, I never get colds. I never really get anything that is interesting. But wait, there's more

to the benefits of having Neanderthal DNA. There are a few genes that are clearly important in early formation of skin, like keratin proteins, and Neanderthals had nice nails. Perhaps it was nice nails or hair. My nails I think are fine. Yeah, I like your nils thinks I don't think me yet. Your Neanderthal DNA does have some downsides. It may play a factor in depression, and it may have something to do with chain smoking. It just so happens that this

sequence now influences your ability to stop smoking. Okay, never smoked. It's a good thing you've never smoked, because you'd find it harder to quit. I may just take up the habit just to see if it's right. Right, just contest this proposition. One of the most mind blowing things the field of archaic genomics has uncovered is that modern humans and Neanderthals weren't the only people around thirty thousand years ago. Forty thousand years ago, we walked around the Earth, we'd

find modern humans Neanderthals. Denisovans that if we went to the island of Flores, we'd see the hobbit individuals. So there was hobbits, Homo florencias, so very small, diminutive archaic human types. So the world was a much more interesting place. Fifty thousand years ago and today, the only remnants that we see of these archaic forms of humans are the scattered remains of their DNA and the genomes of modern individuals. I may not only have Neanderthal DNA. I may have Denisovan, Hobbit,

or who knows what. So I decided to take a test. Do you know one thing about myself? I wonder if my caveman ancestors were any better? Opening packages, a saliva collection kept and all right, no food or drink for thirty minutes. So okay, spit to fill line. All right, Oh god, that's a lot of spit. Twenty minutes later, my cup runneth over with saliva. I have to say this is bringing out a little bit of my competitive tendency. I'm a little jealous that Michael is so neanderthal h

and I don't know. We'll see time to see who's the neanderthalist of them all. And so I actually have the result. I already looked, yet you haven't looked. I have not looked. So I as you heard, I spit in an envelope and sent it in, and I'm gonna look. Now, your DNA tells a story of who you are, and how you're connected to populations, trace your heritage through the centuries and uncovered Cleo one hundred percent. What does that mean? Cleo? Yeah? What is Cleo? Gideon? Hey Mo, remember you were a

little nervous about using your real name. I use the name of my cat. Oh that's the name of Gideon's cat. Is Cleo. I'm one hundred percent Cleo? He was like, So I thought maybe it meant, oh, you've got a one hundred percent of a mark for some disease that's going to kill you, the Cleo disease. Okay, all right, it's already says our ancestry composition. Your DNA suggests your ancestry is forty point eight percent Iberian with ties to

five other populations. And I'm going to view report. Wow, some over forty percent Spanish, okay, which is kind of sexy. And did you know that? Well, my mother's Colombian. Okay, so thirty point two percent Italian Italy. I'm point three percent Ashkenazi Jewish? Are you yes? I It's interesting because a cab driver the other day, asset, are you Jewish? Said to you, are you Jewish? Yeah? And now you

can answer in the affirmative. Hell yes, I am yeah, Hell yes, Okay, I'm three point five percent East Asian and Native American. Oh that's what I was looking for. Oh my god, I have it. Congrats, Thank you, God, don't be jealous. Okay, two two point seven percent Native American, Columbia, Venezuela plus three more, Goobab, Brazil and Maica. That's great. I'm so excited. So where do I find my Neanderthal? It was on a separate tab as far as I recall.

So it looks like I have only only two hundred and thirty six Neanderthal variants, which puts me in the bottom eleven percent in terms of Neanderthal content. Well, it sounds like that researcher was right that you have less Neanderthal than the average person. If you have less than eighty nine percent of twenty three and ME customers, that suggests to me you don't have very much at all. Right,

I guess that's what it means anyway. So okay, so we can conclude I have virtually no Neanderthal, hence our different pronunciations of Neanderthal. Yes, but you do have a real smorgas board of all everything that I wanted, so I wouldn't say it's a tie. I would say you're slightly ahead. And the genetic lottery, you said a Samargus board, but I have no Northern Europeans, so that's why we should what would be something more Payea, which I love

it so much. Well, Mike lean Black, I want to thank you, but you should really be thanking me because this was about finding your roots since I'm basically zero present Neanderthal. Well, thank you. I mean I really feel like I learned a lot about myself, about my family. I now know more about you and simultaneously think less of you because you are not of my species. But yeah,

this was a blast. Before we close, a word from the University of Wisconsin's John Hawks on his predecessors in Neanderthal research, those people whose early analysis set the stage for how Neanderthals were seen for so long. When we look at the scientific world of the Victorian era, you're looking at people who became aware of human variation around the world, but they interpreted it in a very culturally insensitive way. You look at the past and think, oh

my gosh, I can't believe that they said that. But that was the way that they approached their science. Today we look at things totally differently, and when we look at extinct human groups, they had their own ways of living in the world. You have to appreciate they're not us, but they lived at a time with incredible challenges and they overcame those challenges, and that is something really fundamentally similar that we share with them today. We're all experts.

I mean, we can just spit in an envelope and get all the answers right. Far from it. Let's all hope that science and technology will allow us one day to understand why a species of humans is advanced as the Neanderthals disappeared from the planet, so that maybe, just maybe we don't disappear, at least not before our next episode of Mobituaries featuring the incomparable Sammy Davis Junior. I certainly hope you enjoyed this episode and if you would,

please rate and review our podcast. You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me on Twitter at Morocca tell me how Neanderthal you are. For more great content, please visit mobituaries dot com. You can subscribe to Mobituaries wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Mobituaries was produced by Gideon Evans. Our team of producers also includes Megan Marcus, Keith mccauliffe, Megan Dietree, and me Morocca. It was edited by David Fox and

neared by Dan de Zula. Indispensable support from Justin Ader, Genius, Dineski, Kiera, Wardlow, Zach Gilcrest, the team at CBS News Radio, and Richard Rohrer. Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Special thanks du Gary Purdue, Ainara Sistiaga and London's Natural History Museum, and has always undying thanks to Rand Morrison and John carp without whom Mobituaries couldn't live. Hi, It's mo. If you're enjoying Mobituaries the podcast, may I invite you to

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