Ep. 896: Who Were the Neanderthals?

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with authors Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse. Topics discussed: What we mean when we say “neanderthal,” taal v. thaal; 23andMe; human and neanderthal interactions; how language may have operated; cannibalism through the ages; neanderthal fashion; the limits of site excavation; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:08Steven Rinella?

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• 1:32Steven Rinella?

  All right, everybody, it's finally happened after years of talking about it. We have our, we have Neanderthal experts in the room. This is the white, this is the white, my white whale. This is, this is my, you know, my Moby Dick story. I've said for years, I want to talk to some people that actually know something about Neanderthals. And here you are. You found us. They have a book. It's, well, first names. Demetra Papagiani is how it's spelled.

• 2:00Steven Rinella?

  Papayani, Demetra Papayani and Mike Morse. And they have a book that's in its third edition. So the Neanderthals rediscovered. How modern science is rewriting their story. It's in its third edition. It was originally published in 2023. They were just explaining to me that.

• 2:18Speaker 05

  Twenty thirteen.

• 2:19Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:40Steven Rinella?

  And make major changes, right? So something that happened a long time ago, our understanding of it has changed so much that it's caused you to constantly need to go in and update your work.

• 2:50Speaker 05

  At some point, Demetra said, we really need to update this every three years if we want to stay current. It's hard to do that, but you know, we're doing the best we can.

• 2:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because it's so rapidly evolving. And part of the reason I want to talk to you about Neanderthal is

• 3:06Steven Rinella?

  not just in my lifetime, but in the last few years, I've started to feel like I had this image of Neanderthal culture. And in a minute, I want you to explain what Neanderthal is, but I've had this image of Neanderthal culture. And the way it's portrayed in like cartoons and things, you just picture people with big clubs and they're hitting each other with clubs and dragging their knuckles along the ground. And then I would read just as a, just an interested party, reading common news sites, I would read like, oh, they seem that they had art. Oh, perhaps they had jewelry. Um, perhaps they mated with, with humans. You know, they were divers, they were, they were collecting shellfish, they suffered from swimmer's year, whatever.

• 3:51Steven Rinella?

  And I don't know how much of all that is true, but it's just been that I started to visualize them less like some kind of. glorified ape and more like a, you know, they just became more human to the point where I can almost picture that something I had never thought of before that they were there was personalities and right and and so as my understanding has changed, I just wanted to have someone in who could speak to like, who really were they? What happened to them? What did they do? You know, if I saw one across the room, would I instantly know that I was by something different? This is what I want to talk about. This is why you're here. But um, first off, and I don't

• 4:36Steven Rinella?

  care you any of these questions. I don't care who answers it. But um, when we say Neanderthal, what is that? What does that mean?

• 4:45Speaker 06

  They were our ancestors, but they were part of our ancestors, part of what came before us

• 4:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 4:52Speaker 06

  as humans. They were essentially an offshoot of our direct evolutionary line, a side branch of which a little bit remains in us. For most of their part, they lived at the same time as our ancestors, but in different parts of the world.

• 5:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 5:15Speaker 06

  Later on, they met and they were mostly in Europe. But again, later in their span of existence in the Old World, expanded towards Asia, towards the Middle East and Siberia.

• 5:36Speaker 06

  And they chronologically, the what we call pre-Neanderthals, or the earliest forms of Neanderthals, could be going back as far as half a million years. But what we start seeing kind of Neanderthals with the features of that we identify as Neanderthals is closer to about 350,000 years, give or take.

• 6:00Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 6:01Speaker 06

  And they disappeared from Europe, let's say around 40,000 years. And again, there is give or take and new dates and so on. So this is the time span that we are talking about. In terms of their morphology, they were shorter than us, a little bit shorter than ours, and bulkier built.

• 6:25Speaker 06

  They were some, they had some distinct features like the short, shorter than us limbs, proportionally also smaller than us.

• 6:36Speaker 06

  And they had big barrel shaped chests. And their faces were,

• 6:44Speaker 06

  if you take one of our faces, you kind of pull it forward. So you will have this part sticking out farther.

• 6:56Speaker 06

  They, their noses were sticking out farther, their brow ridges were bigger. They didn't have chins. So can you kind of imagine a more bird like profile?

• 7:08Steven Rinella?

  They didn't have a chin?

• 7:09Speaker 06

  They didn't have chins, no. And we don't even know why we have chins.

• 7:13Steven Rinella?

  It's not, it's not clear why we have these.

• 7:15Speaker 06

  No, there are many theories of why we have chins and what they do, but they did not have chins.

• 7:19Steven Rinella?

  I never thought about that.

• 7:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:21Steven Rinella?

  A Neanderthal could kick a normal person, like a Neanderthal could, could beat up.

• 7:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, probably a Neanderthal woman could beat up a modern human man.

• 7:31Steven Rinella?

  Just across the board, like big, like strong.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  No, not, probably not across the board, depending on their lifestyle and.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  But they were very muscular, very strong bones.

• 7:42Steven Rinella?

  I noticed you say Neanderthal.

• 7:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  We're gonna give you the long answer to this.

• 7:47Steven Rinella?

  Please, what do you, what do you go with?

• 7:49Speaker 05

  So I grew up saying Neanderthal, cause I grew up in the United States.

• 7:53Steven Rinella?

  Yes.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  Where that's normal.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Then we lived in the UK for 15 years where everyone says Neanderthal.

• 7:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  My view is they're both right. It doesn't, no Neanderthal is gonna come back and correct us, so we're good. But I think it's worth going into the etymology.

• 8:12Steven Rinella?

  Please.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:13Steven Rinella?

  Cause there's a valley in Germany and

• 8:15Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 8:15Steven Rinella?

  They call that the Neanderthal Valley or something.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  So the, the German word for valley is tall.

• 8:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay, oh.

• 8:21Speaker 05

  And, and originally it was spelled with a T H, but the H was silent. So in German, it's tall. And this is something that we all should know because virtually everyone watching this says, says the German word for valley every day. And now I'm gonna go into the etymology, so.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  Neanderthals came from the Neander Valley. That's where they were, that's where the major discovery was made. And that valley was named after a guy named Joachim Neander.

• 8:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  He, he wrote hymns. Um, and, and so they named the valley after him. The Neander Valley, the Neanderthal. There was another tall, there's another valley called the Joachimstall. Where they had a mint. And so the money that was made from the Joachimstall was called the Joachimstallers. And that got shortened to Thaller.

• 9:16Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 9:16Speaker 05

  And so that's where the, that's where the word dollar comes from.

• 9:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 9:21Speaker 05

  So we say dollar, we don't say Thaller.

• 9:26Speaker 05

  You can say Neanderthal if you want. It's spelled with an H in English.

• 9:32Speaker 05

  I think it's easier to say Neanderthal. The point is, once you start saying it one way, it's very hard to change. Once we were talking-

• 9:38Steven Rinella?

  I've changed two times.

• 9:39Speaker 05

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

• 9:56Steven Rinella?

  Got it. All right, good, good to get that cleared up.

• 9:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're fine.

• 10:00Steven Rinella?

  So over the whatever, since the days of 23 and 23 and me came out and any person could send in, you know, saliva and get a genetic profile of themselves.

• 10:14Steven Rinella?

  People would even call it, uh, you know, I did, I 23 and me'd myself, I did 23 and me, whatever. And all of a sudden, everybody is talking about what percent

• 10:28Steven Rinella?

  Neanderthal they are. Or it would give it to you like less than average, more than average. I was disappointed to see that I'm, uh, I think less than average. I was disappointed to see. What? Do you, do you guys buy that? And what are people really saying when they say that? Right? When, when people look and they get their profile and they see that they're blank percent of Neanderthal descent.

• 10:56Steven Rinella?

  What are we saying?

• 10:58Speaker 06

  So, um.

• 11:02Speaker 06

  It's accurate.

• 11:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:06Speaker 06

  So the percentage you were given, the percentage I was given is, I'm sure it's accurate. There are other things in the 23andMe and this kind of sequencing that I'm not so comfortable with, with the conclusions, you know, I'm like 30% Italian, it doesn't really work this way. But the Neanderthal bit is one of the most reliable things.

• 11:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:29Speaker 06

  What it means, though, is basically that we all,

• 11:35Speaker 06

  all of us who have our ancestors

• 11:40Speaker 06

  outside Sub-Saharan Africa have a component of Neanderthal DNA.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  But my, let's say 3%, my 3% of Neanderthal DNA is not necessarily the same as yours or his.

• 11:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:58Speaker 06

  And if you pull them all together, you can actually reconstruct about, at this point, it's about, I think, 70% of Neanderthal DNA. So we have different bits of Neanderthal DNA in us.

• 12:15Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 12:17Speaker 06

  And for most of it, we don't know what it does.

• 12:21Speaker 06

  Or if it does anything.

• 12:25Speaker 06

  And essentially, I mean, it doesn't mean all that much. It simply means that some, a little bit of our ancestors lives in us because they interbred with us. And actually, even modern humans who come from Sub-Saharan Africa, they also have a tiny bit of Neanderthal DNA. That's one of the very recent findings. We thought that they had none, they had a tiny bit because at some point there was a migration back to Africa.

• 12:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I see.

• 12:59Speaker 06

  And intermixing with it, but it's different. So the big genetic difference in us, in modern humans generally, is that everyone who is from Sub-Saharan Africa has much bigger genetic diversity than the rest of us.

• 13:17Speaker 06

  And and a tiny bit of Neanderthal DNA. But the big story about them genetically is that they are much more diverse than us. Because we as a species developed in Sub-Saharan Africa. And it's a whole different story how, where and when. But at some or at different points, it wasn't only one point. There were several probably waves of leaving Africa, some less successful than others. But basically, you have what you call a bottleneck event. Imagine that you have the big bottle in Africa and then just a segment of that population leaves.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 06

  And this is what the modern humans, us Homo sapiens, who come from outside Sub-Saharan Africa. We are much genetically diverse than the Sub-Saharan African.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Much less diverse.

• 14:10Speaker 06

  Yes, much less diverse genetically. And because of ancestors mixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans, we have that little bit of Neanderthal DNA. For most of it, we don't know what it does. And for most of DNA, we don't know what they. Like if you take a specific gene, we still don't know. For some of them, we don't know they may cause this disease or that.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 06

  But generally, we are not yet at the point where we'll say, oh, this gene does this. No, we don't know yet. It's like a language that we cannot quite read yet.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  I think there's a there's a bigger question about like, are you above average or below average Neanderthal? And to me, the the big answer is most of the world outside of Africa is about the same. It's like 2% plus or minus a little bit. I mean, originally, when when they started, when you when you first could send your DNA off to get its sequence, it would be between 1 and 4% and you could get excited by that. When they've refined it, it's down, it's mostly towards 2%. And.

• 15:15Steven Rinella?

  Everywhere around the world.

• 15:17Speaker 05

  Outside of Africa.

• 15:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 05

  Which which to me tells an amazing story, which is that it's, you know, when that bottleneck of Homo sapiens left Africa, they must have intermixed very quickly with Neanderthals because, you know.

• 15:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 05

  Europe is not that different from East Asia, for example, or, you know, for or even the people that made it to the Americas.

• 15:38Speaker 05

  It's all about the same percentage of Neanderthal DNA.

• 15:41Steven Rinella?

  That that a little bit surprised me because I would picture as humans are spreading around the world. I would picture that some bands of people, some clans, social or whatever social organization structures there were. I would picture that some would go in whatever direction. And have a different level of running, a different level of integration with Neanderthals and then carry that off in whatever direction they went. Especially people that went out and colonized islands. That I would just guess that if you went around the world, you'd find much greater concentrations

• 16:25Steven Rinella?

  of, you know, whatever in some area. Because those people that became those people had just a different experience.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  I think that

• 16:36Steven Rinella?

  Does that, does that make any sense at all?

• 16:37Speaker 05

  Well, the numbers were so small back then. So this, so we went to see this geneticist, Josh Akey.

• 16:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:44Speaker 05

  And I don't quite know what these numbers mean, but he said the Homo sapien breeding population was about 10,000. I don't, but so that doesn't mean there were 10,000 human beings. But in terms of like, who is of an age and ability to reproduce.

• 17:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  And the Neanderthal breeding population, they think was about 1,000 at the time that they met. So it was about 10 to one. And in fact, from, from the, from very early on, if they, you know, the, the kind of hybrids that they find have our modern humans with about 10% Neanderthal DNA. So if, if as they're coming out of Africa, they're part of the same breeding population. Then that 10% kind of spreads around to everyone. And then it's been slowly getting whittled down. It's like, it's being selected out.

• 17:35Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 17:35Speaker 05

  So, I mean, another geneticist used the term toxic, that Neanderthal DNA is toxic. It, it, it.

• 17:44Steven Rinella?

  That's a brand, that's a branding problem for Neanderthals.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  So, so, you know, as, as life goes on, we have less and less of it.

• 17:54Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it. Do you, how do you imagine?

• 18:00Steven Rinella?

  How do you ma- what is the interaction? I mean, I know we don't know. I know, I know we don't know, but how do, how do we imagine it? Was the interaction, um, was it around that Neanderthals are kidnapping Homo sapiens females? Is it they're living in bliss? They're living in mixed communities. There's sort of a, there's sort of a warfare element to it of taking captives and breeding with those captives. What are some of the, like, what are some of the guesses? What are some of the guesses of, or they go like, wow, these people are amazing looking. I'd love to breed with one of them.

• 18:42Speaker 06

  I think we can, I think we can safely say that there wasn't only one scenario.

• 18:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:53Speaker 06

  And, you know, people met and it could be a whole range of things from

• 19:02Speaker 06

  a chance encounter or a chance mating episode to, I wouldn't say living together because culturally we don't see that level.

• 19:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:13Speaker 06

  But maybe, actually, now that I think of it, um, there has, you probably referred to a kind of a recent story just a few months ago about a sex bias.

• 19:25Steven Rinella?

  Yes.

• 19:26Speaker 06

  Now, the sex bias, in that case, they mean it basically how sex is represented in the DNA, not necessarily.

• 19:32Steven Rinella?

  Primarily male Neanderthals breeding with female humans?

• 19:37Speaker 06

  No, no, no.

• 19:38Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 19:38Speaker 06

  So the bias could be that you had more Neanderthal men

• 19:47Speaker 06

  interbreeding with more modern human women.

• 19:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:51Speaker 06

  But it could also be that the Neanderthal female DNA was filtered out because it was not, you know, what he called toxic.

• 20:04Steven Rinella?

  Got it. So it's not conclusive.

• 20:06Speaker 05

  To me, the main takeaway of all this, and it's not just humans, but it's all mammals, is that they're just, they're very promiscuous. Like there's, if you can imagine sexual combinations, they're happening somewhere in nature.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  And so maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise. It was a big surprise when it turned out we carry Neanderthal DNA in us. But maybe it just shouldn't have been. Maybe, you know, there's just mixing everywhere.

• 20:35Steven Rinella?

  Got it, yeah. Like, our being shocked about it was sort of looking at human exceptionalism and not considering what you see in the broader community of mammals in general. Do you, uh... They had a language, you think? They were talking?

• 20:52Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 20:53Steven Rinella?

  How complex?

• 20:55Speaker 05

  That's one of those words that... So for years, the idea was that what... The question is, what makes us special? And it's really disturbing that you've got these really strong, you know, Neanderthals, really strong, kind of strange faces, slightly different bodies, living about the same time that Homo sapiens were. But we've got to explain what makes us special. So for years, the idea was, well, we have complex language and they must not have. And then, well, it turns out they did have language. Well, ours was more complex. I just think it's one of those words to hide behind. Like, we're still special. I tell you, we're still special.

• 21:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  And I mean, at some point, we need to get into the whole... There's a whole theory, the social brain hypothesis.

• 21:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 21:45Speaker 05

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

• 22:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So the word complex language doesn't, that doesn't mean anything.

• 22:20Speaker 05

  Well, to me, it's, it's a way to hide behind, but, but our language is better than their language. Like, cause for a long time, as we, they didn't have language. We have, we, we're the only species that has language. Well, it turns out we're not. So, but ours, we're the only species that has this really, really complex language.

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• 23:47Speaker 00

  What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Apparently, we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices.

• 24:07Steven Rinella?

  When your fresh detector is going off, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com. Well, how do we know they, how do you know they had language? Do you know what I mean?

• 24:17Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 24:18Steven Rinella?

  So let's. Well, if you're looking at bones, how do you, how do you know that they were talking to each other?

• 24:24Speaker 05

  Because the bones that you're looking, well, the bones that you're looking at are the skulls.

• 24:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 24:28Speaker 05

  The size and it's brain size is, is a big thing, but within the brain is prefrontal cortex.

• 24:36Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  And so.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  Which is this part?

• 24:40Speaker 05

  So, yeah, so there is, um, so the, let me just rewind. There was a day that, um, when Demitra was a postdoc at, uh, Southampton in the UK, she came home one day and she's like, Mike, I saw this guy, Robin Dunbar, speak and he explains everything. And I'm like, okay. And you were just like bursting with excitement. It's like, okay, what does he explain? You're like, why do people sing at soccer matches? Why do people sing in church? Um, why do we have language? What's our social organization? It all comes together in this one big theory. So.

• 25:11Steven Rinella?

  Please tell me.

• 25:11Speaker 05

  Yeah. So here's the thing. So, um, so the theory is that, so prefrontal cortex is correlated with group size. So if, if you go, if you look at chimpanzees, which is a nice proxy for our ancestors, pre, you know, pre homo, um, our oldest ancestors from six million years ago, um, they live in groups of 50 to 55 individuals.

• 25:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 25:38Speaker 05

  So how do they keep the group together? How do they know that they're in that group? They do grooming. They spend a lot of the day, you know, picking little insects off each other's backs. If you've ever had someone rub your back, it's incredibly relaxing. You know, there's brain changes. There's endorphins. You feel very close to this person. Um, so in chimpanzees, they groom each other to the point that they all feel like one unit together.

• 26:03Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  So as your prefrontal cortex grows, as the brain gets bigger, the group size gets bigger. So.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  We today have a natural group size of 150, which is called the Dunbar number. And this, and the incredible, there's so many incredible things about the Dunbar number. My favorite is that it's a, it's a hard stop at 150. So if you have like a group of 151, it will break up into two groups. It's just, our brains can't, we don't have the capacity for a group larger than 150. And so you'll see this in the ways companies are organized, the way the military is organized. I once experienced this myself when I went to a conference that had 135 people there. And after a couple of days, you could walk up to anyone in that conference and just say, you know, hi, I'm Mike. Here's what I'm doing, you know, who are you?

• 26:57Speaker 05

  And, and you could just have the most amazing conversation. The next day you would feel like old friends. If there were a thousand people at that conference and I walked up to someone and said, hi, I'm Mike. They might think, who is this guy, you know, like coming up to me like this? So we obviously live in.

• 27:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's interesting that the size of the group, it does, the size of the group

• 27:20Steven Rinella?

  informs or dictates what would be an appropriate way to approach somebody.

• 27:26Speaker 06

  People that you can maintain daily contact with.

• 27:30Speaker 06

  And that's fairly small because you have to, you have to, you have to think of it in terms of how much time, how much of your own time and energy you have to spend to maintain that contact. There is the bigger group of people that you are in contact with regularly, like your friends, but they don't live in the same town. Maybe every once in a couple of weeks, you exchange a text message or there's something like a sport, sporting event that you suddenly interact with a lot for a small number amount of time. And then you don't forget about them, but you kind of don't interact with them for like a month, but they're still there, they're still in your brain, you still spend some time with them.

• 28:10Speaker 06

  And there is the people back then when Robin Dunbar wrote this, that he called the. Christmas card group, the people that the hundred plus that, you know, you consider them your friends, you consider them part of your network, but you may not even talk to them in the year.

• 28:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Speaker 06

  Still, you'll send them a card.

• 28:31Steven Rinella?

  Yes, who you'd invite to your wedding if you had a good budget.

• 28:34Speaker 06

  So think of it this way, or if you even in a dinner party, if you have a small dinner party with four, that's fine. If you have a bigger group, eventually people will kind of split naturally into smaller groups.

• 28:47Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 28:48Speaker 06

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

• 29:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  That instead of spending time one on one grooming, you can spend time with a bigger group at a time. And you spend that time, you know, telling stories, discussing things, gossiping about other people. And that's how you maintain that network. In terms of time, it's a more efficient, language gives you a more efficient way to maintain that network.

• 29:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 29:35Speaker 06

  And then you build other things in like, you know, now we call it dinner parties. Back then it was, I killed a big deer. Do you want to come over and help me with butchering it and take some of the food? And I know that you will invite me over when you do the same thing.

• 29:54Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 29:54Speaker 06

  And so.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  So it's at some point between the kind of 55 maximum of chimpanzees and the 150 of us, there had to be language to maintain that group size. And Robin Dunbar puts it somewhere between a million years ago and 500,000 years ago.

• 30:11Steven Rinella?

  Do you feel that if you look at the timing of humans leaving Africa, okay? Would the timing be that if the Neanderthals had a language, they spoke Neanderthal, let's say? Would it have been incomprehensible to Homo sapiens? Do you mean like, was the right amount of time gone by that they would have developed these entirely different languages? And by that, I mean, if you look at.

• 30:47Steven Rinella?

  When humans are spreading around the world, Europeans developed a certain skin tone, language families, right? So that when they finally come together with Native Americans, all those years later, they're coming from a common place. When they finally re-meet, the languages are incomprehensible, the cultures are largely incompatible. They look totally different. They don't even reckon, they don't barely recognize each other. They have, there's a reluctance to even accept them as fellow human beings, right? So would Neander, like Neanderthal language out in Western Europe would have been probably something totally different

• 31:30Steven Rinella?

  than what Homo sapiens spoke when they met. They weren't yelling hello

• 31:37Steven Rinella?

  across the valley.

• 31:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I, I think when we talk about Neanderthal language, I think we, I don't think they had the same, all Neanderthals had the same language.

• 31:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 31:48Speaker 06

  Um, I mean, it's completely theoretical now, but I can't imagine that people who were not in regular contact would, would speak the exact, the, the same language.

• 31:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 06

  Um, they probably had something similar to maybe our families of languages or, um, you know, groups that were in Western, in, in southwest France probably had different language, uh, from groups in Germany.

• 32:15Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 32:15Speaker 06

  Um,

• 32:16Steven Rinella?

  So like different Neanderthal communities might have had totally different words, quote unquote, words for things.

• 32:23Speaker 06

  We know for how language works, uh, unless you are regularly interacting with another group, you wouldn't have the same language. I mean, even now, French and German are part, are uh, both in the European languages and have a relatively very recent um, ancestor, common ancestor as languages. Uh, but you can't, they're not the same. I mean, it takes, it takes.

• 32:50Speaker 06

  It's closer than Greek and German, which are also, again, in the European languages. But it takes time to learn it. Even if you have Russian and Croatian, they're closer in terms of evolution as languages, they're closer together. But it's the, you can't just walk from one country to the other and just speak as if, you know, you speak their language. It will be easier to understand it.

• 33:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 06

  It will be faster to learn it, but it's not, I just can't, you know, Neanderthals in Siberia wouldn't speak, if they met a Neanderthal in France, they wouldn't speak the same language.

• 33:30Steven Rinella?

  That's a good point. So I had a linguist explain, I had a linguist one time say that if you had, at the time of the American Civil War, if at the end of the American Civil War, you had taken the Mason-Dixon line and built a sort of impenetrable wall that prevented communication with people south of the Mason-Dixon line and people north of the Mason-Dixon line. He said, in that amount of time, they would now not be able to communicate.

• 33:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, it doesn't take a lot of time.

• 33:59Steven Rinella?

  No, all the words, all the words would have gone different.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  I want to look at it the other way, which is, when you're talking about hunter-gatherers, they're on the move, they're traveling a lot, and they're going to run into other people, whether it's Neanderthals running into Neanderthals, modern humans running into Neanderthals, modern humans running into modern humans. You're going to run into other people, and the first thing you have to figure out is, are these people going to kill us?

• 34:23Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  And so it's kind of, it's a human capability to make friends and communicate, whether or not you share a language. And I think the language can come, you know, you can learn each other's languages later, you can embed, you can live with them, and, you know, after whatever amount of time, there are going to be people that are fluent in both. But to me, it's not a question of can we understand, I mean, that's like a modern problem. You know, if I, if I travel somewhere, am I going to understand the locals? But if you're a hunter-gatherer, you're kind of doing this all the time.

• 34:59Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Look, I know language is hard because it's like... There's no record. There's no record of their words, but let's talk about something there is a record of.

• 35:09Speaker 06

  But we do have, we have some anatomical stuff like from Neanderthals that we know, we know that they could produce sounds and a big range of sounds. How it sounded like maybe it was more high pitched than ours.

• 35:24Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 35:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're squeaky, there's big guys with squeaky little voices.

• 35:29Speaker 06

  Because of how they're.

• 35:32Steven Rinella?

  That squeaky little voice is maybe.

• 35:34Speaker 05

  That's, that's the theory.

• 35:35Speaker 06

  That's the theory, yes. But I think in terms of, you know, if you met a Neanderthal or when a Neanderthal met a modern human, they probably, it was probably mostly gestures to kind of understand each other and see who, who is this guy's gonna kill me or not.

• 35:50Speaker 06

  And one side, I don't want to talk too much about modern humans because then we always did this service to Neanderthals because we always like talk about us.

• 36:02Speaker 06

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

• 36:35Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 36:36Speaker 06

  It could be, I'm wearing this necklace that has shells from

• 36:43Speaker 06

  this coast, you know, it could be the Mediterranean coast, it could be the Black Sea coast. Or I have this, you know, this figurines, this portable art, what do they do? We don't know what they did.

• 36:58Speaker 06

  What were they? Were they the sign that, you know, we are here? Or maybe even with art on, rock art.

• 37:11Speaker 06

  Is that a sign that this is our group?

• 37:14Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:15Speaker 06

  So.

• 37:15Steven Rinella?

  This is our land or yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, so when we talk about complex language, what is a complex language? And what is it vocabulary? Is it the syntax? Is it that you talk about abstract things? Is it that you can talk about yourself as a group versus the other group? And how do you signify that if you don't, you know, you come across other people? You don't speak the same language. How do you tell them who you are?

• 37:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 06

  How do you tell them? Oh, I'm, we haven't met, but I am friends with those other guys. And they gave me some of the shells in this necklace. So maybe that's how you show it. Or I am strong and I have, you know, I rule this land. And you can see from the, I don't know, the teeth of the animal that I've hanging on my neck. But we can hunt those things and we, we run this territory.

• 38:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 06

  I'm, you know, I'm speculating here, but this is ways that we try to read from artifacts and from material culture. What, what were they using this for? What were they trying to signify this for? And that's a big difference between Neanderthals and modern humans. It's not they, oh, I see you. Will we hunt together? That we, we are a group of 20 people and want to coordinate who is gonna, you know, how we drive these animals to this narrow ravine, maybe to be able to hunt them better. That I think we know from material culture they could do. We know from the hunting they did, we know the, the number of animals that they killed.

• 38:56Speaker 06

  They, they were pretty good at that. They were pretty good at exploiting the resources together, sharing the food and so on.

• 39:06Speaker 06

  But the more, you can call it sophisticated, complex, abstract of relating with people you don't see maybe every day. That's where modern humans probably had an advantage.

• 39:21Steven Rinella?

  Is there, is there evidence that they ate each other?

• 39:25Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 39:26Steven Rinella?

  The humans and, no, the humans and Neanderthals were eating each other?

• 39:30Speaker 05

  Oh, each other. There are probably, there's lots of evidence that.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  That Homo sapiens were eating Homo sapiens and that Neanderthals were eating Neanderthals. But I don't know if-

• 39:40Steven Rinella?

  There's evidence that Homo sapiens were eating Homo sapiens.

• 39:43Speaker 05

  It's incredibly well documented in almost every period of our past that cannibalism happened.

• 39:52Steven Rinella?

  But there's not physical evidence of a Neanderthal campsite and among their artifacts are butchered Homo sapien remains.

• 40:03Speaker 06

  No.

• 40:03Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  Well, because, so there are a lot, I mean, I think like half a dozen famous Neanderthal cannibalism sites. And mostly those are too old for there to be modern humans being a part of it.

• 40:23Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 40:25Speaker 05

  There was actually, there was a site in Belgium that just came out a couple of weeks ago. That actually does fall into the timeframe that that modern humans would have been around. And it was like this little family that was butchered and eaten and-

• 40:41Steven Rinella?

  Butchered and eaten by who?

• 40:42Speaker 05

  Well, you know, they didn't leave their calling card, so we don't-

• 40:46Steven Rinella?

  So we know that someone butchered and ate a family-

• 40:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:49Steven Rinella?

  Of modern humans.

• 40:50Speaker 05

  No, no, of Neanderthals.

• 40:52Steven Rinella?

  Oh, someone butchered and ate a family of Neanderthals and the timing could be that it was modern humans, but we don't know.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 06

  It could be, yes, but there is no indication that there were any modern humans there by, but-

• 41:07Steven Rinella?

  So it could have been by other Neanderthals.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 41:10Speaker 06

  So for modern humans, we have evidence of cannibalism, as you said, in old time periods. And it could, it can be for, because of starvation, it can be for ritualistic reasons, you kind of-

• 41:31Speaker 05

  You can honor the dead.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  Honor the dead, basically, yeah. Or you keep a part of the dead. Or it could be even for this, you know, in a part of a war and displaying how ferocious and fearsome you are and so on. It's the whole range.

• 41:47Speaker 06

  But most of it, I would, I think, am I right, is not in a violent context in modern humans. For Neanderthals, we have sites with evidence of cannibalism from forty thousand years, for a hundred and twenty thousand years, even pre-Neanderthals, early hominids in Europe before Neanderthals.

• 42:14Speaker 05

  The very oldest skull from, in Europe, was at Apurka, Homo antecesser, almost a million years old, and that was, that was eaten.

• 42:26Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 42:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the oldest Homo of any kind in Europe was, was eaten by other humans.

• 42:34Steven Rinella?

  Because it has butcher marks on it.

• 42:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, it has butcher marks.

• 42:37Speaker 06

  And it has butcher marks, and also in, there's a site in France, a site in Croatia, that you can see that the bones are snapped and cut up, the, exactly the same way that they snap and cut up the animal bones.

• 42:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really? So that's like an eating for food. I mean, if you look at like the history of, go look at the history of Great Lakes tribes, tribes along the St. Lawrence, the Iroquois in, in New York, right? They would practice a widespread cannibalism related to warfare, meaning you'd catch prisoners, and there was a sort of ritualistic cannibalism, very widespread, very well documented, again and again and again, but it was usually tied to, it wasn't tied to like, boy, I'm hungry. It was tied to like a type of domination, right?

• 43:35Steven Rinella?

  Perhaps some sort of religious element to it, but it wasn't like, I'm going out to get something to eat, I'll go hunt down a human to eat. But with this case, that might be what was going on? It might be like you viewed him as a food source?

• 43:49Speaker 05

  Warfare is real is a really recent thing. In terms of in terms of human behavior, like like organized warfare against other groups. Where you you.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  You kill off a lot of people and you take control. That's like one of the most recent homo sapien behaviors to develop.

• 44:12Steven Rinella?

  That's recently.

• 44:13Speaker 05

  So like 20, 30,000 years.

• 44:16Steven Rinella?

  What? Really?

• 44:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 44:19Steven Rinella?

  So you don't think there were wars between Neanderthals and modern humans?

• 44:23Speaker 05

  It's not that there. Well, there were fights, let's say. Because there's always fights and battles, but in terms of let's go and kill everybody.

• 44:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 05

  Or let's take the women and kill everyone else. That's that's a much more recent development.

• 44:39Steven Rinella?

  Like we make a big old plan and it's got step one, step two, step three.

• 44:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:44Speaker 05

  But a lot of a lot of cannibalism is linked somehow to protein shortages.

• 44:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 44:50Speaker 05

  That I mean, the the biggest state example is the Aztec Empire.

• 44:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 44:56Speaker 05

  Which, you know, was a very was, you know, probably one of the at its heyday was probably one of the biggest in the world before the conquest. And they they had kind of state organized cannibalism of prisoners of war. But they also, you know, they they didn't have a lot of other good ways to feed protein to the whole population.

• 45:16Steven Rinella?

  So you think it was it was that cannibalism in the Aztec? Was driven by like literally a need for food?

• 45:26Speaker 05

  This is now I was I was a graduate student in anthropology and this is a very unpopular view in anthropology departments.

• 45:33Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, no, I know. Even what I was telling you about the Great Lakes tribes in the Urquai. People, it's ridiculous, but it's somehow controversial to talk about things that are incredibly well documented.

• 45:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, there's always a reluctance because cannibalism is a slur against a group. Oh, they practice cannibalism, that means they weren't quite as civilized as us.

• 45:56Steven Rinella?

  I want to clarify, I don't hold that opinion.

• 45:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:00Steven Rinella?

  I mean, I don't practice.

• 46:01Speaker 05

  I don't, I don't either.

• 46:02Steven Rinella?

  I don't practice, but like, we're talking about people alive hundreds of years ago. I don't hold it as a, I don't count it against them.

• 46:08Speaker 05

  Well, we can go to the store and buy as much meat as we want, but if, you know, if there's a certain kind of hunger, like if you can, you can eat as much nuts and fruit and vegetables as you want, but if you haven't had enough protein, there's a certain kind of hunger that's almost unbearable.

• 46:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Speaker 05

  And, yeah, I don't, it's always been a part of our ancestors' behavior. And, and it could be, you know, some, a respected elder died and you honor him by consuming everything and then everyone gets fed.

• 46:41Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 46:42Speaker 05

  Or it could be, you know, as part of, as part of a battle against some group. I mean, so like this, the site in Belgium I mentioned is like a Neanderthal family. We don't know that they were-

• 46:55Steven Rinella?

  What were the dynamics of the family?

• 46:56Speaker 05

  Well, I think it was the, it was, I think it was the men were closely related and the women had come in from somewhere else.

• 47:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 47:07Speaker 05

  But even that, we don't know-

• 47:08Steven Rinella?

  How big was the, how big was the group?

• 47:10Speaker 05

  There's like six or so individuals, but we don't know that they were all like slaughtered and butchered at the same time. It could be, because things get preserved in caves, that it could be that, you know, and frankly, that's a lot of meat. You know, that's, six people is gonna feed hundreds.

• 47:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 05

  So you wouldn't, you wouldn't kill six people in Neanderthal times purely for food.

• 47:37Speaker 05

  Maybe they, maybe it was done one or two at a time and they just happened to wash into the, wash into the cave.

• 47:43Steven Rinella?

  How heavy was the Neanderthal?

• 47:46Steven Rinella?

  If you had to guess.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  I think, let's say 150 pounds.

• 47:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so I would say humans would have a poor yield. Like if a deer, 40%, but I bet you humans have a super low yield, a super low meat yield. I would bet, so if you have 100, let's say you have 150 pound Neanderthal.

• 48:13Steven Rinella?

  Let's say you get 50 pounds, yeah, that's a lot, 50 pounds of flesh off that sucker.

• 48:18Speaker 05

  Well, and the Aztecs could cook him into a soup, but Neanderthals didn't exactly have big cauldrons, you know, to get it, to really extract.

• 48:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's a really interesting idea to think about. They'd be like, that's a lot of meat.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 06

  There are a couple of studies that it wouldn't be very, Neanderthals wouldn't be, or humans are not generally very nutritious to eat. I don't know.

• 48:45Speaker 06

  Because they're generally lean, I don't know. But I think if the context of starvation, then that probably changes the equation. I mean, you asked earlier, 40,000 modern humans may have been there, may have been nearby, and that may have increased the pressures on that population, on that small group of Neanderthals. And, I mean, just, and as Mike said, we have these individuals in a cave. But a cave is not a reflection of what was actually happening.

• 49:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, understood.

• 49:21Speaker 06

  Across that group. It's whoever happened to be brought back to the cave, cut up, eaten up, and so on. You know, there probably were more people from that group over 100 years, say, who died and never, didn't die in the cave, never brought to the cave.

• 49:38Steven Rinella?

  I understand.

• 49:39Speaker 06

  Because why would you do that unless you have, you really want someone in the family to bury them properly and bring them in a cave?

• 49:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe they only brought the butchered people into the cave.

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• 50:58Speaker 00

  What's that?

• 50:59Steven Rinella?

  My fresh detector.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Uh, your what?

• 51:02Steven Rinella?

  There it is.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  What is it detecting?

• 51:04Steven Rinella?

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 51:12Steven Rinella?

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.

• 51:26Steven Rinella?

  Take a cave, for instance. From those time periods, like with the Neanderthal site, do you have a bone bed, or a debris pile, or a midden where it has deer? It has cattle bones? It has sheep bones? And just interspersed, interlaid with it are Neanderthal bones? Meaning that they're just routinely eating what I bring home today? Today, I brought home a turtle.

• 51:58Steven Rinella?

  Yesterday I brought home a horse.

• 51:59Speaker 06

  Is crapina like that?

• 52:00Steven Rinella?

  Last week I brought home, last week I brought home another Neanderthal.

• 52:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:04Steven Rinella?

  And it was just all treated the same. Or does it seem different somehow?

• 52:09Speaker 06

  It's hard to tell. Like, he just asked me, now is crapina like that? And I said, who knows?

• 52:14Steven Rinella?

  Is it what?

• 52:15Speaker 06

  Crapina, which is a site in Croatia.

• 52:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 52:17Speaker 06

  Uh, that has, uh...

• 52:19Speaker 05

  It has like thirty, at least, I mean, the, the numbers go back and forth, but probably thirty individual Neanderthals, a lot of whom were butchered.

• 52:25Steven Rinella?

  In a Neanderthal camp?

• 52:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, in a, well, in a cave site.

• 52:28Speaker 06

  In a cave site, but, yeah, I said, who knows? Because it was excavated and almost completely excavated. The whole thing was dug out, excavated and, and, uh...

• 52:38Speaker 05

  Like, a hundred and twenty years ago.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  And probably if, we have no idea, basically. But they kept the human bones. They probably threw away a lot of the animal bones. Now we, if we excavated it now, if we go in really fine detail and

• 52:54Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 52:55Speaker 06

  A lot of time to excavate it and actually see that they come from the same place.

• 52:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there was a bias of what they were looking, what they were looking for.

• 53:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, uh, there was a bias, it was, it wasn't a bias, it was that the methods were very different. And they just didn't, couldn't look at this, didn't want to, didn't have the same questions that we have. Couldn't look at this level of detail. And we just, you just can't go back and reconstruct it.

• 53:16Steven Rinella?

  Got it, I understand.

• 53:17Speaker 06

  More, in more recent excavations, you begin to ask those questions. And you do things what I said, like what I said, you, they're cut up the same way. And, but then caves are not, it's not like you go in and do something this year or this spring, and then you go back in the fall or next year and so on. You can see that nicely laid out in layers. Caves are often, the stuff is often compressed. And what you see in a slice like this could be a few hundred years.

• 53:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 53:52Speaker 06

  Could be a few thousand years. You can't, you can't really go into that level of detail.

• 53:56Steven Rinella?

  Yep, everything is kind of ground in together.

• 53:58Speaker 06

  Yes, uh, again, not always, but often. Uh, in some cases, you have in caves what could be burials of Neanderthals.

• 54:09Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  Um...

• 54:12Speaker 06

  There are, even like in Sidron, it was, it wasn't mixed together. We just know that they were, they ate those.

• 54:21Speaker 05

  Sidron is a cave in Spain.

• 54:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:24Speaker 05

  It's another famous site of where it seems like a small group of closely related Neanderthals were butchered.

• 54:30Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 54:32Speaker 05

  But also butchered animal. I mean, how do you know that it was butchered? Because the butchering looks just like the animal bones.

• 54:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. In a sense, they were not treated as more special.

• 54:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, I got it. You know, you know, the, um, you guys remember the Donner Party?

• 54:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 54:49Steven Rinella?

  Right? These, many years later, these researchers went into the, the trap, the midden sites where the Donner Party

• 55:00Steven Rinella?

  were eating their dogs and some, some things they killed and their livestock, right? And they were expect, they were wondering where are the human bones? Cause we know that members of the Donner Party were practicing cannibalism.

• 55:14Steven Rinella?

  They don't find the human bones. So then people pointed out, well, they must not have done it.

• 55:21Steven Rinella?

  The question is, perhaps they regarded those remains differently. Meaning you were forced to commit cannibalism. You were forced to eat your relatives. But that doesn't mean that you flicked the bones out with the dog bones, right? They might've had a separate way out of respect or whatever, that they would have entombed those remains or burned them up in a fire or, or something that was more ceremonial, even though they ate them. Something was more ceremonial than throwing them in the garbage pile.

• 55:55Speaker 05

  Well, there's also a huge difference in timescales. So you could go to the Donner Party, which was not that long ago.

• 56:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 05

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

• 56:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I got you. What, what evidence do we have of how they dressed?

• 56:29Steven Rinella?

  And did they, and I remember seeing like this idea that they had jewelry. And I can't remember the details, but someone throwing out the idea that maybe they were getting the idea of wearing jewelry from modern humans.

• 56:45Speaker 06

  Okay, yep.

• 56:47Steven Rinella?

  Like, what were they wearing and were they like beautifying themselves?

• 56:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay. So some of these things we can answer and some we cannot. I'll start with the beautifying, okay? Uh, and the skin. I mean, we do tattoos, we, we do coloring with red oak or whatever. Uh, none of this will survive.

• 57:07Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 57:07Speaker 06

  So they could be having elaborate rituals of getting together and painting and, you know, my group does this, your group does that. We will have no idea about that.

• 57:20Steven Rinella?

  No, no, there would be no way to know if they were tattooing themselves.

• 57:23Speaker 06

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

• 57:41Speaker 06

  You know, there, there could be whole areas of stuff that they were doing that we just cannot

• 57:48Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 57:48Speaker 06

  have any handle on.

• 57:52Speaker 06

  Whether they used clothing? They did, because they wouldn't have survived in Ice Age Europe without clothing.

• 58:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 58:01Speaker 06

  Now saying Ice Age Europe, it wasn't always uniformly cold. Uh, some periods were fairly warm, even as warm as today. But generally to survive, especially overnight, it would require some kind of clothing.

• 58:18Steven Rinella?

  Do, do, would it require tailored clothing? Or you think they could have just draped themselves with skins?

• 58:23Speaker 06

  So tailored clothing would definitely have been better. We don't have any evidence of needles from Neanderthals. We do have, we have them from modern humans very early on, but not from Neanderthals.

• 58:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 58:36Speaker 06

  But we do know that they could make string and maybe they could fashion something this way. So they, the general thing is that they must have used, you know, they, they had some kind of clothing. How, going back to the elaborate, the word elaborate that can, we can use for anything. How elaborate it was, whether it was, you know, fashioned enough to provide better protection from cold? We don't quite know.

• 59:10Speaker 06

  Jewelry, we have some evidence of using jewelry. And going back to that crapping aside, they had.

• 59:28Steven Rinella?

  It's eagle talons.

• 59:30Speaker 06

  Yes, the eagle talons that now, now the researchers think that they were fitted together in a sort of necklace.

• 59:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 59:38Speaker 06

  Because they also have kind of wear on the sides from rubbing against each other.

• 59:43Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really? Like a necklace of eagle talons?

• 59:46Speaker 06

  Yes. Again, it's not all that common, but we know that they did. And they did perforate shells. The thing that you mentioned about, did they learn it from modern humans?

• 1:00:01Speaker 06

  There is this timeframe in, in southwest France. We have Neanderthals and modern humans at the same time, towards the end of the presence of the Neanderthals and the beginning of the, of modern humans in Europe. We have some sites where they overlap, but overlap in a prehistoric, in a, in a paleolithic sense, which means that one could be here, Neanderthals could be here now and for, you know, a few years in one site and then leave and then a hundred years later, 50 years later, modern humans come. No actual direct interaction with them.

• 1:00:41Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  And we're talking earlier about genetics and interbreeding and so on and how things have changed.

• 1:00:50Speaker 06

  Back when we were graduate students, the idea was that modern humans and Neanderthals were in that part of France. At the same time, they, but they did not mix with each other. Because we didn't know, the whole genetics things hadn't come in yet.

• 1:01:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like, we didn't know that they were hooking up.

• 1:01:09Speaker 06

  No, absolutely not. They had a barrier. They did not want to do that. They were not doing that ever. There was somebody, actually, somebody who wrote a book. It's kind of, he writes more popular archaeology for a bigger audience. And he wrote a little book, I think, or a paper, I can't remember. He said, "No sex, we are Orygnesians." Orygnesians is the culture name of the earliest modern humans in southwest France. We call the stone tools and stuff that they produce, Orygnesian culture.

• 1:01:39Steven Rinella?

  He was making a book saying there was no sex between humans and Neanderthals.

• 1:01:43Speaker 06

  It was a joke. It was a joke. It was a joke, and other people saying, no, they had no contact.

• 1:01:48Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:01:49Speaker 06

  I mean, strictly speaking, it was true. We had no evidence to show that they had contact. But we kind of, most people were saying they did not. Anyway, so the idea was there that, so the Orygnesian side was modern human. We thought it was modern human. And the Chateauronian, which is the other culture, the other layers that we found, we thought they were Neanderthal.

• 1:02:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:02:15Speaker 06

  And there are tools in the Chateauronian and shells that looked, that looked like, looked similar to what modern humans were doing. And the idea was doing that, was that the Neanderthals, oh, maybe the Neanderthals saw them and thought, oh, this works. This works well. This looks like it could be a good thing to make.

• 1:02:40Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  And they kind of recreated the shape, but with a different method of napping the stone.

• 1:02:47Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:02:48Speaker 06

  And the idea was also the shells, maybe they just saw them. From modern humans and then they found their own and started using that. Now, this.

• 1:03:01Steven Rinella?

  That, yeah, that's really interesting that it was that they knew the end, the end goal, but weren't, but developed a different process to achieve that thing.

• 1:03:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So you see something, you say, oh, I can make that. But you don't actually make it the same way as the person who made it.

• 1:03:18Speaker 05

  So this was, so this was stone tools, but it was also jewelry.

• 1:03:21Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  So it was like primitive Neanderthal jewelry, or that's what they thought it was.

• 1:03:25Speaker 06

  Yes. So, but now the thinking is more that the Neanderthals developed these things, could have developed these things on their own. But also, we have evidence of modern humans in Europe earlier than just the 40,000 years.

• 1:03:42Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:03:43Speaker 06

  Small, very small, very localized. So, um, personally, I would not be surprised if five years from now, there is clear evidence that Neanderthals did shells and jewelry or, and art on their own, developed it on their own. And I would also not be surprised is actually we have more modern humans. And maybe there was more interaction and exchange and learning from each other than we thought.

• 1:04:16Steven Rinella?

  Man, we're never gonna know enough to know enough.

• 1:04:21Steven Rinella?

  Jimmy, you're never gonna answer all that, like, you know, we're never gonna know, was there ever, whatever, you know, was there, like, they ran in and, and, and a, a modern human and a Neanderthal had like a relationship and split off and.

• 1:04:38Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 1:04:39Steven Rinella?

  Started a family, you know, and like in some cave or whatever, like, well, just never, it's just, it's frustrating. It's frustrating the things we'll never know about how they interacted.

• 1:04:48Speaker 05

  We, we, we, again, we've been talking to all these geneticists and one of them said, I think we just have to accept that things were messy and that we're not really gonna know the full story.

• 1:04:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. There's a, there's a quote we use a fair bit on the show and it was introduced by a guest and it was, um, "The past is a strange country."

• 1:05:09Steven Rinella?

  Right. And then here you get to, um, it was a, I don't know, it's a real strange, the past was a real strange country.

• 1:05:16Speaker 06

  This is a foreign country.

• 1:05:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the past, that's right. The past is a foreign country.

• 1:05:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Steven Rinella?

  So, because it, it's just, there's no,

• 1:05:28Steven Rinella?

  you, you can get a little bit, like you can look at all the times in, in, in, in, like when Europeans kind of in, in the 1300s, 1400s, 1500s, when, when Europeans kind of broke out of the continent.

• 1:05:44Steven Rinella?

  And we had transoceanic ships, right? And they started running into all these long lost relatives, right? They reached South America, whatever. They reached the high Arctic. And you have these interactions. Um, and the perception of the percept, like people that did pair off, right? Like, like French that would come over and they would build a family with a Native American woman. How that was perceived, right? The cultural clash of it, the way their peers looked at it. Um, just that we'll never know

• 1:06:23Steven Rinella?

  what the perception was. How, how is it perceived socially? That, that humans and Neanderthals are pairing up. You know what I mean? Like, we'll just never understand it.

• 1:06:34Speaker 05

  Or would they have, would they have noticed it at all? Or would it have just felt like another case of, oh, there's some guys over there?

• 1:06:43Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's true too. Maybe there wasn't this huge comprehension that they were a different people with a different history. It was just they were a thing. They were

• 1:06:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:06:53Steven Rinella?

  A thing that was mostly like me.

• 1:06:54Speaker 05

  Maybe it just happened.

• 1:06:56Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:06:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I considered that. I always like to think of it in terms of like really dramatic encounters.

• 1:07:02Speaker 05

  It's an us and them thing, but to me, to me, the perspective is that it was all us. Like it wasn't us Homo sapiens and them Neanderthals. It was part of a big breeding population and it wasn't just those two. There was Denisovans. There's, there's evidence of. Some very archaic, perhaps Homo erectus ancestor with intergression into Denisovans.

• 1:07:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:28Speaker 05

  There's talk of ghost ancestor is a term that geneticists use when they know that it's old, but they don't know what it is. And there's, there were cases in West Africa of really recent, like 20,000 years, intergression from something archaic.

• 1:07:44Steven Rinella?

  That we haven't identified.

• 1:07:45Speaker 05

  We don't know what it is. And there's even one model that says, you know, 2% of our DNA is Neanderthal, up to 20% could be a ghost ancestor.

• 1:07:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  And by that, it could be just, there's a lot of mixing in. I mean, this, I keep hitting this, mixing in is just something that is part of our past.

• 1:08:04Steven Rinella?

  I know that you explained that you had these people, the Neanderthals were spread over this huge area. So you can't speak, like, what the, the, the calendar looked like for Neanderthals in Siberia was different than what the annual calendar was for Neanderthals on the Mediterranean, right? But what, what was their diet? And do you see that their diet was different than modern humans? Was the component of their diet significantly different than what modern humans utilized when they arrived on the same landscape?

• 1:08:43Speaker 05

  Neanderthals, like you said, they kept, they kept surprising us the last 10, 20 years. Oh, they did this, they did this. It was all very modern. The one thing that they, the one threshold that they haven't fully crossed is fishing. That Homo sapiens had really sophisticated harpoon spears to fish for catfish.

• 1:09:06Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:09:08Speaker 05

  Far earlier than we, than anyone expected, than anyone realized. And

• 1:09:14Speaker 05

  Well, as Neanderthals did seasonal shell,

• 1:09:20Speaker 05

  you know, seafood collecting mollusks, and maybe did some fishing, the level was completely different. And I think that was a that was a major change in diet.

• 1:09:31Steven Rinella?

  Were Neanderthals making hooks?

• 1:09:33Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:09:34Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:09:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:09:36Speaker 05

  We went to see the earliest harpoon points, which are at the Smithsonian.

• 1:09:42Speaker 05

  And it's it's just mind blowing that these things are 90,000 years old. And that they were that modern humans in Africa were spearing catfish that that.

• 1:09:51Steven Rinella?

  Was that right, really?

• 1:09:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. And if you think about it, like a catfish, a 70 pound catfish is going to feed a lot of people.

• 1:09:59Speaker 07

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• 1:11:11Speaker 06

  What's that? My fresh detector. Ah, your what? There it is.

• 1:11:16Steven Rinella?

  What is it detecting? Fresh produce? Fresh meat? Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:11:25Steven Rinella?

  Apparently, we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com. Do you see in Neanderthal campsites or in caves, is there a lot of evidence that they were processing nuts and seeds? Or do they seem to be primarily carnivorous?

• 1:11:48Speaker 06

  When you excavate very carefully and with techniques that are available now and were not available even 10 or 20 years back, you find the little seeds, you find the plant remains.

• 1:12:05Speaker 06

  You can go into the plaque of teeth.

• 1:12:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  And, you know, they, you know, luckily for us, didn't have hygienists. So a lot of it is still left on their teeth. So you can remove that and you can find what they, you can find even remains of seeds or...

• 1:12:25Steven Rinella?

  Cake down to their teeth?

• 1:12:26Speaker 06

  Yes, cake on their teeth. Or you can see the scratches on their teeth.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  My favorite one was, is evidence that they were eating chamomile.

• 1:12:33Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:12:34Speaker 05

  So like we, so they might have been big game hunters, but they, you know, they enjoyed their cup of herbal tea.

• 1:12:41Speaker 06

  Maybe it was for medicine.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  We use it as medicine. Maybe it was for flavoring. And it was actually a few years back in a cave in Iraq, Shani Dar. They found a sort of flatbread type of thing, flatbread.

• 1:13:02Speaker 06

  I don't know.

• 1:13:04Speaker 05

  Well, but made of lentils?

• 1:13:05Speaker 06

  It was, it was basically lentils or a form of lentils.

• 1:13:12Speaker 06

  In water, probably soaked in water and then kind of mushed pulverized and then mixed with nuts.

• 1:13:20Steven Rinella?

  So they had a little recipe?

• 1:13:22Speaker 06

  And that, yeah, they did. And they, they baked it. And uh, basically, because the, the people who published it did, uh, studied this in this site and another site in Greece that also has a long sequence. That same, similar recipe, more or less, they, modern humans made it also at the same site.

• 1:13:43Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:13:43Speaker 06

  Again and again later, you know, if you look at the, because these, some caves have long sequences that can go uh, for tens of thousands of years, not uninterrupted, but you can find uh, slices in time. And, you know, even, so that, the, the Neanderthal thing was seventy thousand, is seventy thousand years old, roughly. Uh, there was a modern human stuff from thirty thousand years and for younger also that they made a similar, because they had access to the same plants, basically.

• 1:14:12Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's fascinating.

• 1:14:14Speaker 06

  So a similar kind of thing, processing lentils and, and uh, uh, adding nuts and even grasses. I don't even, you know, I'm not very good with plants. I'm not one of these people who recognize plants where they see them. Uh, but they had like wild olives, which was my favorite, wild grapes.

• 1:14:33Steven Rinella?

  They would eat wild olives?

• 1:14:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Steven Rinella?

  Little charcuterie plates and stuff, yeah.

• 1:14:38Speaker 06

  I guess, yeah. I, you know, that little flatbread you could add a piece of-

• 1:14:43Steven Rinella?

  No, I would have never guessed that they had a little-

• 1:14:45Speaker 06

  Grilled meat on top, wouldn't it taste great?

• 1:14:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that'll, that'll be the next article, that Neanderthals invented pizza, right?

• 1:14:54Speaker 06

  No, Mark, gyro, you know, not pizza. Uh, um, but, and in terms of, will we ever find this? Will we ever find that? We also, ten or twenty years ago, never thought that we would find genetic material, be able to say this person was related to this person. You know, this were mother and daughter. We never thought we would find a hybrid and be able to say that this girl was actually had a Neanderthal father and a mother and the niece of a mother.

• 1:15:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Speaker 06

  We never thought we would find this stuff. We also never thought we would be able to find the degree of plant remains that we find now. Or fish, for example, yes, fewer fish bones from Neanderthal sites, but to find the fish bone in an archaeological site, it takes a lot of work and takes a lot of sieving very, very carefully, which most people didn't do. You know, people didn't do this stuff routinely, even twenty or thirty years ago. And if you go to these old sites in Europe, in Europe, we know a lot about Neanderthals in Europe, and that's great. And we're all interested in that because we know a lot.

• 1:16:06Speaker 06

  But also, a lot of these old sites that our knowledge comes from are destroyed.

• 1:16:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13Speaker 06

  They were completely excavated when they were excavated. Now, we go very carefully, very slowly. We leave part of the site so that people who are archaeologists who come twenty or thirty years later and say, oh, we can look at this question now. You know, you have questions like, how did they interact? What did they do? We can look at this question now at this site that we know has this potentially relevant evidence and look at it in much more detail with what we know now. So now, we intentionally leave a lot of the site untouched so people can come in the future and do it.

• 1:16:45Steven Rinella?

  And apply future technologies.

• 1:16:47Speaker 06

  We can't go back to Crapina and see what they had because there's nothing left to actually go and excavate in the site again.

• 1:16:55Steven Rinella?

  I'm imagining the end of Neanderthals.

• 1:17:01Steven Rinella?

  Historically, I pictured it, not historically, like it, in my mind's eye, I pictured the end as being that there's, you know, one little family left in a cave somewhere hiding, you know, and the modern humans are, you know, eventually stumble across them and kill them off. And they're like, ha, we did it. You know, we rid, we've rid Europe of the scourge of the Neanderthal. And now it's our time to take possession of the continent and shine, you know, there's, there's that narrative, right? But there's this other narrative that

• 1:17:39Steven Rinella?

  it didn't go that way. And you said it was this meta-population of people. And there was far more modern humans on the landscape than there were Neanderthals on the landscape. And in certain circumstances, they interbred. And then maybe without anyone noticing, one day, gradually, one day, they're just, there weren't any. Or because they'd been absorbed into the population, you know? Do you imagine it more like, more like them dying out, right?

• 1:18:21Steven Rinella?

  Like, so the passenger pigeon, like, we know who the last passenger pigeon was, it was named Martha, it died in whatever, 1903 in the Cincinnati Zoo, or whatever the hell it was. Like, do you imagine it like that? Or do you imagine like a fading that wasn't realized by anyone? Like, the Neanderthals didn't even know that they were vanishing?

• 1:18:42Speaker 05

  I think it's a fading. I mean, there's, there's this, they call it the Lepido child, this young boy skeleton in Portugal. It's like 24, 25,000 years old. A Gravettian, we were talking about the Gravettians were these amazing people who came into Europe and much more advanced. And debate went on for years. There seemed to be some Neanderthal traits in him. Like, some of his bones kinda looked a bit Neanderthal. And so like, the old school, who thought at the time they were the new school, was saying, "No, that's impossible, there were no hybrids." Modern humans had completely replaced the Neanderthals by then.

• 1:19:23Speaker 05

  So we're talking about, if the last identifiable Neanderthal bones are 40,000 years old, so, we're talking about 15,000 years later. There's the skeleton that kinda looks like a hybrid. So, I think it's more like that fading out, that, you know, the kinda, like, at some point, there were no more purebred Neanderthals. But in a way, there's no such thing as a purebred anything in human evolution, because there was, there were mixing events happening all the time. But to me, it would have faded out that way, of the mixed populations looking less and less Neanderthal, until you could no longer see it. You can't see it in us, you can just get it from our DNA.

• 1:20:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Rather than, you know, because if you're gonna make a movie about it, man, you'd make a movie where they knew they were at the end.

• 1:20:16Speaker 06

  Well...

• 1:20:17Steven Rinella?

  Do you know, they knew they were the last ones left, you know, but that's putting like, a level of drama on it that maybe wasn't there.

• 1:20:25Speaker 06

  I don't, yeah. I think over the area of where the Neanderthals were, probably different scenarios played out.

• 1:20:33Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's a good point.

• 1:20:34Speaker 06

  In some cases, you could have had Neanderthals who disappeared from their land, or left that land and never came back, even, maybe even before modern humans showed up.

• 1:20:45Steven Rinella?

  I got a last question for you. What would you, I'll ask this to each of you. What is the thing you wish you knew the most about Neanderthals? Like, if you could have a question answered, what would it be?

• 1:21:01Speaker 06

  You know, the most now, or knew, like, sometime in the past?

• 1:21:07Steven Rinella?

  Like, what is it, what is the burning question? And even if it's something that you know you'll never answer, like, what is a sort of easily understood question that you have?

• 1:21:20Speaker 05

  I mean, I would, I want to get back to your question of was their language as complex as ours. I would, I would want to know if they understood nuance, if they, if they could laugh at a subtle joke. To me, that's, that's a big part of humanity. They, they had so much, but they didn't have everything that Homo sapiens had. And that, to me, is like, would they laugh if I said some stupid joke? Would they get dad jokes?

• 1:21:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Speaker 05

  That's what I would want to know.

• 1:21:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Would they ever roll their eyes at someone?

• 1:21:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Steven Rinella?

  Like, oh, that guy.

• 1:21:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I think they would roll their eyes at someone, but like subtle jokes.

• 1:22:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:00Speaker 05

  That's what I'm thinking.

• 1:22:02Steven Rinella?

  It's a good question.

• 1:22:03Speaker 06

  Yeah. I guess I would put it also in the, in the how their minds worked.

• 1:22:12Speaker 06

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

• 1:22:25Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:22:26Speaker 06

  And kind of how much they, how much forward planning they had.

• 1:22:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. If they thought like, I would like to make

• 1:22:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Steven Rinella?

  X in the future, but first I'll need to go do this and this and this in order to get ready for that down the road.

• 1:22:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. So if I sit on this, if, if me and my mate sit on the, you know, outside this cave and we watch the animals over there migrate, would they be able, how much would they be able to see, okay, so if I stay here in the spring and they migrate south and if I bring, they do this and then do that. And if we kind of move them, direct them this way, me and my friends can trap them over there. Because how much knowledge they had of the world around them and how much they could plan ahead and coordinate with others and what to do.

• 1:23:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Steven Rinella?

  My question is not really a question, but like I, you know, I married a modern human, just because of no options.

• 1:23:40Steven Rinella?

  But I do wonder, had I encountered that Neanderthal woman with the eagle claw necklace? Do you know what I mean? Would I have been into her? Yeah, would I have been strict, would I have fallen in love, you know, with that necklace? You know, that's the question. And the other one is like I brought up earlier is, um, just again, it just burns in my head is like, what was the comprehension level of?

• 1:24:09Steven Rinella?

  Could they comprehend of themselves as a thing? And if they could, could they comprehend of it as being a thing that was coming to an end? And you're like, just probably not.

• 1:24:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Steven Rinella?

  Probably not, because without written record,

• 1:24:26Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:24:38Speaker 05

  I think it's only really recently that we modern humans think of ourselves as one thing.

• 1:24:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Speaker 05

  I mean, when, when just the term Homo sapien was developed, there were five subcategories. And, and you mentioned when, um, and about the discovery, you know, when Europeans discovered the Americas and there were people there, there was a debate, are these from the same creation?

• 1:25:04Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:25:05Speaker 05

  So the, the notion that we are, we Homo sapiens on earth today are one, it's, it's a new idea.

• 1:25:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:14Speaker 05

  And so if Neanderthals are thinking, you know, they're, they're, you know, we're talking about group size.

• 1:25:22Speaker 05

  You know, they, they probably had their 130. And that was, that's probably, that was their world. Those are my people. They didn't think beyond that. And then if they encountered other Neanderthals, they probably thought that's something different.

• 1:25:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But you imagine like, uh, take like,

• 1:25:41Steven Rinella?

  Bison guy.

• 1:25:45Steven Rinella?

  We, we, we have very few of them. Very few of them left relative to how many there were, right? Those individual animals, as far as we know, those individual animals carry with them no recognition of what they once were, or what happened to them, or no idea that there's something less than that their empire collapsed. Do you know what I mean? They're like, we know it, but as far as we know, the way we can comprehend it, they have no idea

• 1:26:20Steven Rinella?

  of what their history is.

• 1:26:23Steven Rinella?

  They're just, right? They're aware of the ones around them, but they would have no way, they would never have a way of conveying like, we, we used to dominate this landscape.

• 1:26:34Speaker 06

  But even

• 1:26:37Speaker 06

  that idea that we have is pretty recent.

• 1:26:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:41Speaker 06

  Uh, like if you were even a farmer in medieval Europe, did you even know what Europe is?

• 1:26:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:26:50Speaker 06

  I mean, you had, but still people had, you know, stories. They had religion, they had traditions. They, they, they had stuff that was, was passed down from generation to generation. So they had some notion of where they came from, what their group was, without having this, you know, they had never seen a map of Europe.

• 1:27:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Speaker 06

  Equally Homo sapiens in 30,000 year old Europe had never seen a map of Europe, had no idea, oh, my ancestors came from Africa and we, you know, we have taken over the world and now we're going to take over Europe also. There was, there wasn't such a thing.

• 1:27:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 1:27:28Speaker 06

  Or you, you could, but they probably, and even the Neanderthals probably did have the notion of their group was coming to an end.

• 1:27:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:37Speaker 06

  Their family and maybe their parents and grandparents, you know, as far back they would go.

• 1:27:46Speaker 06

  I mean, we don't know, but probably when they sat in the campfire or whatever equivalent they had, they did tell some stories, they did transfer to their kids the way of doing things. You know, you work the stone this way, you cut the, cut up the animal this way and you prepare, cook the food this way. All this was stuff presumably was passed down from generation to generation. And along that, some idea of, you know, where they, that they had ancestors, that they were a group. But how farther geographically or chronologically a notion they had.

• 1:28:31Speaker 06

  It was certainly nothing similar to us now, but also most of our ancestors did not have that perception of a world that went so far beyond them. Most of our, often quite a lot of our ancestors not move very far from where they were born.

• 1:28:49Steven Rinella?

  Do you guys think you'll, um, do you, do you envision a fourth edition of your book? As new stuff comes out?

• 1:28:58Speaker 06

  I was actually thinking when you started that the, you know, the different editions to update it. Our book started because the previous book from the same publisher had, was completely out of date.

• 1:29:13Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:29:13Speaker 06

  And I was at that point teaching and teaching continuing education classes for adults. And I said at some point, I don't know what to tell these people to, to read because they can't just go to the library and read all the articles with all the new stuff. And there is no easy way, you know, no book to give to them. And he goes, well, why don't we write that?

• 1:29:40Speaker 06

  And the person who wrote the previous book, or one of the two also previous, was my postdoc mentor. And I think at some point, I said to him, would you want to do that? He goes, oh, my God, no, that would be writing the book from the from scratch. There's no there's no rewriting that book because it's too far out of date. I suspect that.

• 1:30:08Speaker 05

  I think we're there. I think.

• 1:30:10Speaker 06

  I suspect that if we redo it, it will take a lot of work.

• 1:30:13Steven Rinella?

  It needs to be at some point, it needs to be like a demolish and rebuild.

• 1:30:17Speaker 05

  Well, the categories, like if you were reading a Neanderthal book, you would want all the questions you asked, where's the section on ornament and clothing? Where's the section on Neanderthal diet? 10 years ago, there wasn't enough to fill a section of either of those things. Where's a section on Neanderthal cave art? That didn't even exist. So now there are all these new sections. And so we would just, we would organize it differently if we had to do it today.

• 1:30:44Speaker 06

  I guess so, yeah.

• 1:30:45Steven Rinella?

  Well, if you want to find out what, if you want to find out what's known now, okay, the current landscape, check out The Neanderthals Rediscovered How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story. Make sure you get the third edition, right?

• 1:31:02Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:31:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, don't get the first, to get the third edition. Authors, Dimitri, I'm gonna do the phonetic, Papa Gianni, Papa Gianni, just so you know when you're reading it, is pronounced, I was laughing earlier, because Giannis, my beloved colleague, his father, we call Papa Yanni. And say your last name?

• 1:31:25Speaker 06

  Papa Yanni.

• 1:31:28Steven Rinella?

  Dimitri Papa Gianni, or Papa Yanni, and Mike Morse. And then if you want, you know, as things change and update, look to these, look to these authors to keep you up to speed. Thank you for joining.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  Thank you so much. This has been fun.

• 1:31:42Steven Rinella?

  Appreciate it.

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