What happened to the Neanderthals?

Humans' success might have meant the Neanderthals' downfall.

They were brilliant people. I'm not dissing the Neanderthals.

And we even find it in neanderthals and animals.

We don't know, but it's possible that Neanderthals didn't do this.

You're not going to hear from alien Neanderthals. They're not building transmitters.

This may also be surprising because the Neanderthals were never in China.

At the same time, Neanderthals lived across Europe and Western and Central Asia.

We would expect there to be no difference, because Neanderthals were never in Africa.

Presumably, they did so first in the Middle East, where there were Neanderthals living.

So we can then ask for Denisovans the same things as for the Neanderthals

It's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives, the Neanderthals, had social learning.

Not just in modern humans, but in one of our distant unrelated ancestors, the Neanderthals.

Do we have any idea how we could have defeated Neanderthals if they also had language?

The reason why I don't believe that tells us that the Neanderthals had language is here's a simple analogy

Though the Neanderthals may have acquired some of their neighbors' advanced technologies, they soon found it hard to keep up.

So that today, the people living outside Africa have about two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.

And we found that this individual shared a common origin for his DNA sequences with Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago.

As humans moved into Europe, they also ran into the Neanderthals, who'd been living there for hundreds of thousands of years.

What we know about this FOXP2 and Neanderthals is that they may have had fine motor control of their mouths who knows.

If you look at our ancestors, the Neanderthals and the Homo erectus, our immediate ancestors, they're confined to small regions of the world.

So this individual comes from a population that shares an origin with Neanderthals, but far back and then have a long independent history.

In the West, there were Neanderthals in the East, there were Denisovans maybe other forms of humans too that we've not yet described.

Svante found that the FOXP2 gene, which seems to be associated with language, was also shared in the same form in Neanderthals as us.

And that's the reason why, as you look at the hominid fossil record, erectus, and heidelbergensis, and floresiensis, and Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, all overlap.

So the model we've proposed to explain this is that when modern humans came out of Africa sometime after 100,000 years ago, they met Neanderthals.

So, with that little bit of technology, humans went from a small band of 10,000 or so the same number as Neanderthals everywhere and we suddenly exploded.

Had we chosen this option, sometime around 200,000 years ago, we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40,000 years ago.

Now we have to counter that, though, against the evidence we've heard that we might have had some rather distasteful genetic dalliances with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.

The ones on the right were made by Neanderthals, our distant cousins, not our direct ancestors, living in Europe, and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago.

The Neanderthals were stocky, and physically better adapted to the cold climates, but the newcomers proved to be very skilled at shaping natural materials into useful and attractive objects.

Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus, but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species, the Neanderthals,

They meet Neanderthals, mix with them, continue to spread over the world, and somewhere in Southeast Asia, they meet Denisovans and mix with them and continue on out into the Pacific.

We don't know quite where the borders between these people were, but we know that in Southern Siberia, there were both Neanderthals and Denisovans at least at some time in the past.

There's evidence that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life experience of survival of these people proved of value to the community.

In fact, genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old, which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the Neanderthals.

And to begin to answer such questions, my research group since over 25 years now works on methods to extract DNA from remains of Neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old.

And it was well enough preserved so we could determine the DNA from this individual, even to a greater extent than for the Neanderthals actually, and start relating it to the Neanderthal genome and to people today.

The two populations coexisted, even interbred, for a few millenium, but by 35,000 years ago, Neanderthals were confined to the southwest corner of Europe, and soon thereafter, they had disappeared, another unsolved mystery, yes, our story is full of them.

There were other forms of humans around, most famously perhaps, Neanderthals these robust forms of humans, compared to the left here with a modern human skeleton on the right that existed in Western Asia and Europe since several hundreds of thousands of years.

And then these earlier forms of humans disappear, but they live on a little bit today in some of us in that people outside of Africa have two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals, and people in Melanesia actually have an additional five percent approximately from the Denisovans.