The Last Neanderthals

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Speaker 19 It's 55,000 years ago. For hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals have roamed the lands of what is today Europe and Western Asia.

Speaker 19 Over that time, they've been able to survive and thrive in a whole host of different climates and environments, stretching from the coasts of Iberia and southern Britain to Iraq and Western Asia and even Siberia.

Speaker 19 They lived in caves, these natural places of shelter. They carved effective tools out of wood, ansler, bone, and stone.

Speaker 20 They made art.

Speaker 19 They lit fires. They had their own methods of communication, although what they were, we don't know.

Speaker 19 And yet, 55,000 years ago, this was a species in decline. And what's more, a new species was about to emerge onto the scene.

Speaker 19 One that would come into direct contact and potentially conflict with Neanderthals. Homo sapiens.

Speaker 20 Us.

Speaker 19 It's the Ancients ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

Speaker 19 Today we're continuing our Ice Age miniseries this February by exploring the enigmatic story of the last Neanderstoles and why they ultimately went extinct. This is a really exciting field.

Speaker 19 Over the past few years, new information has come to light thanks to a mix of archaeological and DNA research, revealing how late Neanderstals and Homo sapiens interbred some 50,000 years ago.

Speaker 19 Many of us in the world today have Neanderstal DNA in our genomes. Yet the Neanderstoles themselves soon went extinct.

Speaker 19 Many reasons have been put forward as to why this occurred, closely linked with the arrival of modern humans in their territories.

Speaker 19 To talk through the possibilities, I was delighted to interview Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum. Chris is one of the leading lights in the field of human evolution.

Speaker 19 He has also been on the podcast several times before to talk about all things varying from the origins of Homo sapiens to the first first Britons to the mysterious story of a massive cranium discovered in China called Dragonman.

Speaker 19 Now he's back to explain the story of the last Neanderstools.

Speaker 20 Enjoy.

Speaker 19 Chris, as always, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Speaker 20 It's a pleasure to be with you again.

Speaker 19 Now, you're a very modest man, but you are one of, if not the oracle, when it comes to Neanderstools. You've been in this field of research for decades, so very, very grateful for your time.

Speaker 19 And to talk about this particular part of the Neanderthal story one which still feels very mysterious yet one where there's a lot of research going into at the moment I mean what ultimately happens to the Neanderthals is quite the topic yes it is it's a topic that's obviously exercised scientists since they were first found they're not here now so what happened to them and did we play a role in their extinction and how rich a record do people like yourself and scientists have for wanting to try and learn more about why they ultimately disappear?

Speaker 20 Well yes, so for this time period, if we focus on their last time, let's say between 40 and 60,000 years ago, we've got a lot of Neanderthal sites.

Speaker 20 We have a lot of them with archaeology, so Neanderthals made characteristic stone tools, which we can recognize.

Speaker 20 And we know that the Neanderthals spread all the way from Western Europe over to at times to Siberia. So they had a very wide geographic range.

Speaker 19 That's the length of Eurasia.

Speaker 20 It's a huge area, absolutely. It's possible they even extended into places like China at times, but that's not so certain.

Speaker 20 But they had a very wide geographic range, and they have a huge range in time. Of course, the Neanderthals are around for hundreds of thousands of years.

Speaker 20 Although we think of them as being cold-adapted, we think of Neanderthals alongside mammoths and reindeer. They also lived in warmer conditions, so it was often very warm.

Speaker 20 In places like Europe, we find them alongside elephants and hippopotamuses in Italy 250,000 years ago. So they were wide-ranging and quite adaptable in the areas in which they lived.

Speaker 20 And of course, in terms of fossils, the best known ones are from Europe. That's where we have the best evidence.
That's where they were first discovered.

Speaker 20 As we move further east, there are less Neanderthals. We've got good samples from places like Israel, from Iraq.
But as we go further east, the actual fossil sample runs out.

Speaker 20 But we've got DNA, of course, adding to the story now.

Speaker 19 Plus, we've got DNA as well for Neanderthals.

Speaker 20 Yes, so in 2010, we got the first high quality reconstruction of a Neanderthal genome and now we've got several Neanderthal individuals with high quality genomes from Europe and from Asia.

Speaker 20 And of course it's even now possible to get DNA from cave sediments.

Speaker 20 So this is a great thing for the future that even at a site where you haven't got a single Neanderthal fossil, you could have a trace of those Neanderthals if they were at the site at all.

Speaker 20 Maybe they're urinated in the cave, maybe a woman gave birth in the cave, that could have left a trace which can be picked up from DNA. So you don't even need Neanderthal fossils now.

Speaker 20 And this means in the future, we'll have an even better picture of their range from looking at sites where we've just got Neanderthal archaeology.

Speaker 20 The sediments in those caves may well contain their DNA as well.

Speaker 19 I mean, it's so interesting, Chris, because I remember chatting to your colleague Adrian Lister and also David Meltzer about the woolly mammoth and that DNA evidence for these great beasts of the ice age as well.

Speaker 19 And it seems similar with Neanderthals in the fact that there must be so much DNA out there from P, from Pooh, from where they ate and stuff.

Speaker 19 So so much more to gain, to learn about them from just doing more studies of those sites that we know Neanderstools were once in.

Speaker 20 That's right, yes. And so we've had an explosion of data in the last 10 years and that explosion is going to carry on.

Speaker 19 So you mentioned 60,000 years ago, Neanderstools, they occupy this huge geographic range stretching from modern-day Europe. all the way to Eastern Asia.

Speaker 19 So were there almost different lineages of Neanderthals by that time? So you have Neanderstool as that wide-reaching name, but almost, is it subspecies beneath?

Speaker 20 Yeah, so the Neanderthals, obviously, as I mentioned, they go back hundreds of thousands of years, and so they must have diversified in that time.

Speaker 20 But what's interesting is that the picture we have of the late Neanderthals is that there's actually quite low diversity.

Speaker 20 So a lot of those early lineages have either disappeared or we haven't found their traces of them yet.

Speaker 20 The Neanderthals are relatively, you know, compared with Homo sapiens today, the Neanderthals have much lower variation. Some of their populations in the last 20,000 years are even quite inbred.

Speaker 20 So they're having to breed with close relatives, which is not good for the gene pool, of course.

Speaker 20 So we think that in the last 20,000 years, the Neanderthals were relatively low in diversity, probably relatively low in numbers.

Speaker 19 And those last 20,000 years, do you mean between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago when we had that last evidence for Neanderthals in the world?

Speaker 20 Yes, that's right.

Speaker 20 So at the moment, looking at radiocarbon dates or Neanderthal sites and where we have Neanderthal archaeology, at least in Europe, it's very difficult to find evidence of them, good evidence of them after 40,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 Now, we can't say the same as we go further east because the record is much less well dated. So in Iraq, they're around probably until 45,000 years ago, possibly younger.

Speaker 20 And even further east, I mentioned they were in Siberia, places like that. We don't have a good fix on how late they went in some of those other regions.

Speaker 20 So it's possible they extended and survived further east later. It's also possible that they died out across their range in quite a short time around 40,000.
We're not certain of that at the moment.

Speaker 19 So is it fair to say that even by 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals having already been around in the world for hundreds of thousands of years, have they already passed their peak at that time in terms of numbers across the world?

Speaker 20 Yes, I mean it's always difficult to estimate numbers.

Speaker 20 Obviously we've got archaeological sites where you can attempt to estimate numbers, but the genetic data suggests, as I mentioned, that they were low in diversity in that period between 40 and and 60,000.

Speaker 20 They were low in diversity, but we do have surviving Neanderthal DNA evidence of it that comes from earlier sites. And that suggests they were more diverse 100,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 Now, that's the last interglacial. I mean, the last interglacial, the warmest stage was about 120, 125,000 years ago when it was as warm or maybe even slightly warmer than today.

Speaker 20 We're coming back to those temperatures now, of course, unfortunately, in our with global warming. But that was a warm period.

Speaker 20 And interestingly, the Neanderthals actually thrived, although as I say, we think of them as cold adapted. Actually, that could have been their peak time in terms of numbers.

Speaker 20 Probably there were large numbers of Neanderthals 120,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 And then after that, with the decrease of suitable environments, with the decrease in temperatures, their numbers may have shrunk and their ranges perhaps shrank as well.

Speaker 19 And Chris, could you please explain why genetic diversity and studying it is so important for understanding whether species like Neanderthals are successful, they're enduring well, or they are starting to decline?

Speaker 20 Yes, so when we look at modern species that are threatened, of course, we think of

Speaker 20 particular groups of tigers, particular populations of elephants, populations of gorillas. Some of these are very threatened.
They're low in number and they're low in diversity.

Speaker 20 And once a population gets down to a few thousand, it really is at risk from diseases, from very rapid climate change, from some kind of exploitation, some kind of competition can tip them over the edge edge to extinction.

Speaker 20 So we're aware of that today with people trying to save some of the last rhinos, for example, in certain areas. Well the Neanderthals,

Speaker 20 probably in their last 20,000 years, we could say that they probably were a threatened species in the same way. They were low in numbers and low in diversity.

Speaker 20 That's bad for the gene pool, of course, because if you've got low variation, you may get a buildup of what you can, in simple terms, bad mutations, may build up in the gene pool.

Speaker 20 It also limits your ability to adapt genetically to changing conditions if you've got low numbers and low diversity.

Speaker 20 So it was bad news for them and possibly they were already a species in trouble by 60,000 years ago, even before Homo sapiens made a significant impact on them.

Speaker 19 So they'd be quite fragile to changing climates, for instance.

Speaker 20 Yes, rapid climate change have probably been pruning their numbers. So the climate from about 100,000 years ago, the climate in Europe was fluctuating dramatically.

Speaker 20 Every few thousand years, it fluctuated from nearly as warm as today to to bitterly cold and that happened over and over again every few thousand years and some of these switches in climate were very rapid probably even in the lifetime of a single Neanderthal they might have seen the environment that they were used to completely changing perhaps from relatively benign woodlands and things to a glacial tundra or if they were adapting to cold conditions they might see it suddenly change into much warmer conditions and that would be a challenge for them too because they're adapted to one environment and then it rapidly changes let's talk about the intelligence and the lifestyle of these Neanderstoles before we move on to the arrival of Homo sapiens and that impact on the Neanderstol numbers.

Speaker 19 First of all, the toolkit.

Speaker 19 When we think of ancient human species alongside Homo sapiens, we think of things varying from very simple stone tools all the way back in the older one with very early human species to the hand acts of Homo erectus.

Speaker 19 With the Neanderstoles and the late Neanderstoles, how complex is their toolkit by then?

Speaker 20 Yeah, so, well, you really need an archaeologist to answer that one properly.

Speaker 20 But from my point of view, yeah, we know that the Neanderthals were capable technologically they were more capable than probably I would have said 20 years ago I would have said that there was a quite a big behavioural gulf between us and the Neanderthals that we were making all these complex tools and making art and so on and the Neanderthals largely weren't doing that What we've learnt in the last 20 years is that Neanderthals were doing a lot of the things that we used to think were probably unique to Homo sapiens.

Speaker 20 So this behavioural gap has considerably narrowed. Some people think it's disappeared completely.
I don't go that far. But they were very capable technologically.

Speaker 20 So yes, they were largely making stone tools. Of course, it was their main way of making things for food processing and weapons.
But of course, it wasn't the only material.

Speaker 20 And we've got to remember that wood would have been very important for them. And unfortunately, in most cases, the evidence of all that wood technology has disappeared.

Speaker 20 There are a few rare examples where we find wooden artefacts, but that must also have been important for them.

Speaker 20 So for example, we know that they were making wooden spears and we know that some of their stone points must have been mounted on handles as spears, either throwing spears or for thrusting.

Speaker 19 And attached with like resin or something like that, some sort of natural strain.

Speaker 20 And some of these may just have been simply pushed into a wooden shaft but in other cases it looks like they were even able to make resins, quite complex technology to treat tree material, tree resins and sap and so on, treat these with heat to make them into a kind of glue, which enables you to fix the head on to the shaft.

Speaker 20 So they were capable of that. They certainly, in many situations, were capable of making fire, it seems, at will, and that would have been very important for their survival.

Speaker 20 And even art, there's evidence now that Neanderthals were marking cave walls. They certainly were making marks on bones and things.

Speaker 20 And there's quite a debate about, you know, how much artistic expression the Neanderthals had. In my view, we haven't yet got a representation by a Neanderthal of a person person or an animal.

Speaker 20 That still seems to be unique to Homo sapiens. But in terms of their adaptations to different situations, we know now that they were, in some cases, adapted to living by the coast.

Speaker 20 So from our excavations in Gibraltar 20 years ago or more, we were able to show that there they were adapting to coastal living. They were collecting and eating mollusks from the sea.

Speaker 20 they were even butchering at times dolphin and seal. Now the seals, they might well have been out and clubbed baby seals, but it's possible the dolphin was a stranding.

Speaker 20 But they certainly were very used to those coastal environments and they were exploiting them for food. And again, that's something that 20 or 30 years ago would have been much more debatable.

Speaker 19 And should we then imagine you've got these small groups of Neanderthals, some living by the coast, others hunting mammoth or living further inland?

Speaker 19 So they've adapted, even with this kind of low genetic diversity, they are still in pockets across Eurasia, surviving off different foods and drink and so on and so forth.

Speaker 19 But at the same time, there must be communication, maybe behavioural activities like burial as well.

Speaker 19 So these are kind of intelligent but isolated small communities throughout this geographic landmass.

Speaker 20 Yes. I mean it's difficult to really map how much these Nyanta groups are connecting with each other.
So there are different views on this.

Speaker 20 Some people think that they did have quite wide communication networks. We can look at that to an extent with the movement of raw materials.

Speaker 20 For example, stone tool resources move across the landscape. And by and large, it looks like Homo sapiens extended their networks much wider.

Speaker 20 But the Neanderthals certainly were mobile and they certainly must have been in contact with other groups because they were exchanging mates.

Speaker 20 So there are a couple of sites where we can even look at the mating patterns of Neanderthal groups.

Speaker 20 And at least from the sites where we've got the data, it looks like the males were largely staying in one location and the females were coming into those locations from elsewhere. So

Speaker 20 what's sometimes called a patrilocal mating system.

Speaker 20 So within a particular Neanderthal site, in mitochondrial terms, which is the lineage is inherited through mothers to their children, the mitochondria suggests that the males are closely related to each other, but the females are more diverse in mitochondria.

Speaker 20 So that must indicate there is movement of people, and in this case, the movement of women. into particular Neanderthal groups.

Speaker 19 People can deduce that from the surviving DNA or from the surviving remains.

Speaker 20 That's right, yes.

Speaker 20 So there are Neanderthal sites where even from the mitochondrial DNA preserved in the cave sediments, as well as in the individuals' DNA themselves, you can show this pattern of small diversity in the males of the Neanderthals compared with large diversity in the females.

Speaker 19 So there's this Neanderthal world that's existing some 60,000 years ago. So let's introduce our other main protagonist into this story, protagonist species.

Speaker 19 Chris, when do we start to see Homo sapiens emerging onto the Neanderthal scene?

Speaker 20 Well yes, so that's an interesting question where again we're getting new data all the time.

Speaker 20 So there seems to be an early incursion of Homo sapiens into Neanderthal areas even more than 200,000 years ago. Oh wow.
So there's a site in southern Greece, Apidima Cave.

Speaker 20 It's actually a complex of caves stacked vertically in a sea cliff in southern Greece.

Speaker 20 And in one of those caves, they found two skulls very close to each other, which for a long time were thought to be two Neanderthal skulls, maybe 150,000 years old.

Speaker 20 But I've been involved in work which has shown that, first of all, the skulls are not the same age.

Speaker 20 They seem to be brought together through deposition in the cave, but they don't actually belong together because they're not the same age.

Speaker 20 And what's interesting is one of the skulls, it's only the back of a skull, looks like a homo sapiens. So it doesn't show Neanderthal features in the back of the skull, it shows Homo sapiens features.

Speaker 20 And that fossil is at least 210,000 years old. So incredibly, if that data are correct, there was a Homo sapiens living in southern Greece more than 200,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 And what's interesting is, maybe 30 or 40,000 years later, you've got a Neanderthal fossil at the site. So the sapiens seems to have disappeared and the Neanderthals are in occupation.

Speaker 20 So this could be an early and what you could call it unsuccessful dispersal of Homo sapiens from Africa through Western Asia as far as Greece. Perhaps it went even further, we don't know.

Speaker 20 But it was one which then disappeared and the Neanderthals come back.

Speaker 20 But interestingly, that presence of sapiens outside of Africa more than 200,000 years ago does square with genetic data that suggests that there was a rather mysterious interbreeding event between Homo sapiens, early Homo sapiens and early Neanderthals, maybe 300,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 So that again would imply there was either Neanderthals got into Africa, but more likely sapiens came out into Neanderthal territories, did some interbreeding with them and actually affected their mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome diversity.

Speaker 20 They seem to pick up a sapiens-like mitochondria and Y chromosome. And that estimate suggests that maybe 5% DNA was exchanged between the groups, maybe 300,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 So that's still a mysterious and poorly understood time. But that epidemic fossil from Greece is maybe a clue.

Speaker 20 to the sort of movements, early movements out of Africa, which ultimately were not sustained by homo sapiens.

Speaker 19 But this is also important to highlight, isn't it, Chris, that with the kind of focal area of Neanderthals that we think of, with Eurasia, Europe and so on, and the focal point for the evolution and emergence of Homo sapiens, these were two completely different areas of the world.

Speaker 19 So for much of the time, they were separate from each other.

Speaker 20 Yes, the fact that we and the Neanderthals developed these distinctive anatomies suggests that the evolution was largely separate over hundreds of thousands of years, certainly at least half a million years on present thinking.

Speaker 20 We and the Neanderthals evolved separately, but

Speaker 20 being separate doesn't mean being completely separate. So within that separation and distinction of building up different characters, now and again these groups met and exchanged DNA.

Speaker 20 And this is a pattern which we now know from modern species that are closely related.

Speaker 20 So when we look at birds and mammals, maybe 20% of these closely related species are doing a bit of interbreeding with each other.

Speaker 20 And so it seems that this is a way for those species to actually improve their genetic diversity because as they go their separate way, they take particular genetic pathways and they may lose diversity.

Speaker 20 So by interbreeding with your neighboring species you may pick up some diversity that you've lost and that could be useful for you. So it looks like species do this.

Speaker 20 They largely closely related ones at least for maybe a million years, maybe two million years, they may continue to be able to exchange DNA with their closely related species.

Speaker 20 And it looks like that's what happened, which certainly is what happened with us and Neanderthals. And also it happened with us and Denisovans.

Speaker 20 And even Denisimans and Neanderthals were intergreeding with each other. And I know we haven't talked about Denisovans yet, but they were a lineage that we know about living over in the Far East.

Speaker 20 So there are actually these three major lineages evolving, us in Africa for most of the last half a million years, Neanderthals in Eurasia, mainly the western part in the last half a million years, and over in the Far East.

Speaker 20 Denisovans also evolving in that time period over the last half a million years.

Speaker 19 It is also really interesting, just just quickly, this idea that maybe Neanderthals, when they were at their peak and had a lot of genetic diversity, living in all these various different landscapes, if earlier on some Neanderstoles had actually made it to Africa and met earlier Homo sapiens, that's fascinating to consider.

Speaker 19 I know it's not proven, but still quite interesting to think about.

Speaker 20 Yes, it's certainly possible. So the Neanderthals reached right down in southern Israel.
So they're only a few hundred kilometers from Cairo there.

Speaker 20 So of course, you know, these populations wouldn't have known Africa was separate from Western Asia.

Speaker 20 For them, it was just a landscape that they might have traversed, maybe following their food, you know, migrating herds and so on.

Speaker 20 So certainly, it's not impossible that just as Sapiens came out of Africa several times, it's possible Neanderthals even came into Africa at times, and we can't map that at the moment.

Speaker 20 And then there are areas like Arabia. So you've got the huge area of the Arabian Peninsula, a massive area.
We know that Sapiens were there about 95,000 years ago from just a single handbone fossil.

Speaker 20 But Neanderthals were probably there as well some of the same time. So that's a whole area again where we have a lot to learn about when populations are in those regions.

Speaker 19 Just so you can also describe to us now, Chris, as you're here, so the differences in bodily structure between a Neanderthal, a late Neanderthal, and a homo sapien going out of Africa, let's say 60,000 years ago.

Speaker 19 What were the key differences in their structure?

Speaker 20 Yeah, so looking at the whole body skeleton, the Neanderthals were, by and large, were shorter and wider, very wide shoulders, very wide pelvis. They've got a big almost bell-shaped rib cage.

Speaker 20 So it's a rib cage that's differently shaped to our own. There's a suggestion that all the organs of the trunk of the Neanderthals were bigger.
So the lungs might have been 20% bigger than our lungs.

Speaker 20 And that might have also applied to the kidneys, the liver and so on. So their trunks were very bulky and their pelvis is wide, partly to accommodate that extra bulk in the trunk.

Speaker 20 They're powerfully built, so the bones are strong and thick. They have large muscle insertions.
The articular connections are quite wide.

Speaker 20 So the skeleton's built to withstand a very demanding lifestyle. Whereas in sapiens, we've got by a larger, more lightly built skeleton, relatively taller, slimmer frame, maybe a bit less muscularity.

Speaker 20 So this partly is a reflection of genetic inheritance, partly the cold adaptation. So in colder conditions, it's good to have a short and wide body.

Speaker 20 to minimize your skin surface area to maintain heat. So that might partly explain the Neanderthals overall difference.

Speaker 20 But also it could be a difference of lifestyle, that possibly Sapiens were increasingly using technology to take the weight off their skeletons.

Speaker 20 So using tools to do some of the heavy lifting, some of the heavy work, rather than having to use muscles as well.

Speaker 19 Within like sledges or something like that, maybe?

Speaker 20 Yes, it could be. And the use of strings and nets and ropes and, you know, maybe...

Speaker 20 having a more efficient weapon system, throwing spears largely compared with thrusting spears, which the Neanderthals might have much more been inclined to use.

Speaker 20 And so the body shape is certainly distinct between us and the Neanderthals. And that's also true for the cranium, for the head.

Speaker 20 So our brain case shape is high and rounded, whereas Neanderthals skulls, in keeping with most of these earlier humans, the skulls were longer and lower.

Speaker 20 And the brain within is longer and lower in shape. compared with the sapiens one.

Speaker 20 At the front, of course, there's a strong brow ridge for the Neanderthals, which again is a common feature of all these earlier humans, to have a strong brow ridge over the eyes.

Speaker 20 The face in Neanderthals is very characteristic.

Speaker 20 Perhaps one of their most distinctive features is that the nose is very large and projecting, but it's part of a complex in the face where the whole middle of the face is pulled forwards and the cheekbones sweep back.

Speaker 20 So that's very distinctive. That's found in Neanderthals for hundreds of thousands of years.

Speaker 20 And when we look at their teeth, they've got relatively large front teeth and they seem to have used their front teeth as a third hand to grip things in their mouths when they were manipulating food or other objects to maybe to work tools.

Speaker 20 They held them in their front teeth. So the front teeth are quite large and they've not got much of a chin on the lower jaw and their ear bones are even distinctive.

Speaker 20 So these tiny little structures which we can't even see buried deep in our temporal bone from CT scanning we can look at the shape of those bones that partly to transmit sound and also concern with balancing the head, they are different in shape from Neanderthals and homo sapiens.

Speaker 20 And the differences between us and Neanderthals in those earbone shapes is as great or even greater than we find between, let's say, gorillas and chimpanzees.

Speaker 20 So that's really quite a distinctive feature, which is laid down before birth. So it's got to be pretty fundamental genetically.

Speaker 19 So the toolkit for the Homo sapiens, as you've highlighted there, Chris, different lifestyle, different use of technology, presumably with Homo sapiens.

Speaker 19 So when they are moving into Neanderthal territory, will they also be bringing in their small groups their own technologies, their own toolkit with them?

Speaker 20 Yes, that's right. So we assume that Homo sapiens was bringing its own technology and using perhaps a wider range of resources.

Speaker 20 Neanderthals did make use of quite difficult to work material like bone and antler and ivory. The Neanderthals did use those materials, but to a lesser extent than Homo sapiens did.

Speaker 20 So we get a wider range of technology. Of course, again, all the wood technology that they would have had has disappeared.
So we can't tell how different they were there.

Speaker 20 But it also seems that in some cases, homo sapiens are even associated with bows and arrows.

Speaker 20 And that, of course, is really complex technology where you've got to have careful selection of the wood to make the bow. You've got to be able to make the bow and the right sort of strength and size.

Speaker 20 You've also got to make your arrow shafts, maybe the same wood or a different wood. You've got to make your string for the bow out of animal or plant tissue.
And that's a complex task.

Speaker 20 and you've got to mount, of course, quite a light projectile head on the end of the arrow to make it effective.

Speaker 20 So it looks like bows and arrows were being used at least by some early homo sapiens groups, and that enables you, of course, to do killing at a distance, which is a lot less dangerous than having to get close to your prey.

Speaker 20 It's thought that, in many cases, Neanderthals were what's called confrontational hunters.

Speaker 20 They were having to get close into their prey, requiring a lot of strength, of course, a lot of courage as well, and then having to stab the prey with a thrusting spear.

Speaker 20 That's very effective, of course, but it's also more dangerous and it requires a lot more physical strength.

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Speaker 19 Are there any key archaeological sites that highlight these Homo sapiens with the big successful dispersal out of Africa some 60,000 years ago?

Speaker 19 Are there any key sites sites that show them finally reaching Neanderthal territories in Europe?

Speaker 20 Well yes, I mean there are an increasing number of sites showing this early penetration. So one of the most famous ones recently published is Grot Mondrain

Speaker 20 in southern France in the Rhone Valley. And there you've got what's now a rock shelter.

Speaker 20 It's partly collapsed but this has a long history of occupation by Neanderthals going back to at least 70,000 years.

Speaker 20 And the Neanderthals were there most of the time from 70,000 years down to probably 40 or 42,000 years ago when we get the appearance of homo sapiens.

Speaker 20 But at about 54,000 years ago, there's one brief occupation by a completely distinctive group based on their technology.

Speaker 20 So they're not making the typical Neanderthal stone tools, which are these quite larger flake tools.

Speaker 20 They're making in this industry, you've got thousands of tiny little points, which are interpreted by some people as being arrowheads.

Speaker 20 And this industry is completely distinct from anything known in Western Europe at the time. It's there briefly, maybe an occupation of less than 100 years.

Speaker 20 And there's just one fossil tooth from that level.

Speaker 20 There are teeth from other levels that show they were Neanderthals, but that one level with this industry called the Neronian after a nearby site, this industry is associated with homo sapiens.

Speaker 20 There's one tooth, which is a deciduous tooth, a milk tooth, but it's a homo sapiens child.

Speaker 20 So it looks like homo sapiens managed to come up the Rhone Valley, probably we assume, traveled from from further east along the Mediterranean coast, up the Rhone Valley, into this area where there are several sites showing this Neronian industry, but only there for less than 100 years and then disappearing again.

Speaker 20 And Neanderthals come back.

Speaker 19 And that was all last seen from one milk tooth that survived?

Speaker 20 Yes, that's right. There's just one tooth.
There are several teeth in the other levels and one milk tooth which you can show structurally.

Speaker 20 Unfortunately, you haven't got the DNA from it, but structurally, it's a homo sapiens child.

Speaker 20 But interestingly, when we come into the later Neanderthal levels, we've also got this wonderful skeleton of Thorin, nicknamed Thorin from Lord of the Rings. And this is a male Neanderthal skeleton.

Speaker 20 It's still being excavated. And this is in the levels after 54,000 years ago.
And Thorin has even got DNA.

Speaker 20 And that DNA is distinct, not only from sapiens, but also from many of the other Neanderthals.

Speaker 20 So I talked about the low diversity of Neanderthals overall, but Thorin actually has a distinct lineage from most of the other late Neanderthals.

Speaker 20 And that suggests that there were pockets of diversity surviving in Europe until less than 50,000 years ago. And Thorin represents one of those pockets.

Speaker 20 And interestingly, his closest relatives in Gibraltar, there's a Neanderthal from Forbes Quarry. It was found in 1848.

Speaker 20 It's one of the very first Neanderthal finds, even before the one from the Neanderthal, Neander Valley in Germany.

Speaker 20 and that Forbes Quarry Neanderthal, we've got DNA from that, and the DNA is similar to Thorin's.

Speaker 20 So there is a similarity between Gibraltar and the Rome Valley in this late time suggesting that there were surviving pockets of Neanderthal diversity, but Thorin's lineage too disappeared.

Speaker 20 So by 42,000 years ago, we've got Homo sapiens occupying Rot Mondrain. So the Neanderthals have disappeared from there.

Speaker 19 But that's interesting also to highlight it is not just Homo sapiens arrive, Neanderthals disappear straight away.

Speaker 19 It's several thousand years that this, all of this is happening in Western Europe as a good example.

Speaker 19 But it must also be fascinating for you and others and just me thinking about it to consider those first meeting points some 60 or 50 000 years ago between groups of homo sapiens and groups of neanstals already living in their isolated areas across eurasia and i'm guessing the variety of responses there must have been it's not all the same everywhere that these first meeting points happen.

Speaker 19 Maybe there's cooperation or there's conflict straight away. The language barrier.
This is fascinating to think when these two two types of humans meet.

Speaker 20 Yes, I mean, it must have been an incredible time and it's a shame we have a time machine to go back and see exactly what happened. But yes, you're right.

Speaker 20 I'm sure there were many different encounters, different kinds of encounters between these populations.

Speaker 20 So when they first met, and of course, we've mentioned that they could have met even more than 200,000 years ago. They also met, and we haven't talked about it.

Speaker 20 They also must have encountered each other in Western Asia 100,000 years ago, because we've got early Homo sapiens at sites like Shkul and Kafsay in Israel about 100,000 years ago, and we know Neanderthals were at least in the vicinity at that time.

Speaker 20 And what's interesting is that the industries at Shkul and Kafsay, for some people, they even look a bit Neanderthal like.

Speaker 20 People have speculated there could have been contact between the populations, which even influenced them culturally.

Speaker 20 And so when we look at the situation after 60,000, yes, we've mentioned Grot Mondoran, where there's this brief occupation by Homo sapiens.

Speaker 20 And when we come to 45,000 years ago, we've got better evidence of Sapiens establishing themselves in places like Romania and Chechia and Germany and even Britain.

Speaker 20 It looks like Homo sapiens were reaching these areas in probably small numbers, pioneering groups, but encountering the Neanderthals.

Speaker 20 So possibly to begin with, the groups avoided each other. These were strange people, not known to each other.
And maybe the first reaction would have been to try and keep apart.

Speaker 20 But obviously, As climates change and move them around, as population numbers maybe grew, it was more likely they were going to be in contact with each other.

Speaker 20 And of course, these could have been hostile encounters with actual warfare between them. But equally, they could have been more peaceful.

Speaker 20 With evidence, of course, that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens did interbreed. So that suggests direct contact.

Speaker 20 But at the moment, with our knowledge, it's actually very difficult to know how often they're in the same place at the same time. We just don't have the precision of dating.

Speaker 20 And when there are sites with occupation by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and I mentioned Epidemicave, I mentioned Grot Mondrain, of course the occupations suggest separate occupations at the moment.

Speaker 20 But at Grot Mondrain, it's possible that you've even got occupation within a year or two by one group or the other. So they are very close to each other in time and space.

Speaker 20 And obviously from the interbreeding, we know at times they were there at the same time. So we can't actually map how often they competed with each other.

Speaker 20 but clearly there would have been economic competition because of course they're going to be wanting to hunt the same animals, they're going to want to collect the same plant resources and they're going to want to live in the best environments, the best cave sites, the best valleys for hunting and so on.

Speaker 19 I was going to ask that.

Speaker 19 I mean when they are ultimately sharing that same environment even if they are peaceful is that competition for economic resources, is it ultimately inevitable and one group will ultimately suffer more than the other?

Speaker 20 Well, yes, I think even when we look unfortunately at our own species today, you know, we have this competition between different groups of our species today and it can be fierce and it can be deadly.

Speaker 20 And so that must have happened at times. And so

Speaker 20 in terms of looking at why the Neanderthals disappeared, I tend to think it's going to be a combination of features rather than one single thing.

Speaker 20 But yes, I'm sure that the Neaantiles, as I mentioned, they already were potentially vulnerable.

Speaker 20 in terms of their low numbers and their low genetic diversity, and it might not have needed much to tip them over the edge to extinction.

Speaker 20 And perhaps the appearance of another species that was even at times just a few percent better at exploiting the environment could have tipped them over the edge.

Speaker 20 But it clearly wasn't all a one-way traffic of Neanderthals disappearing because I've mentioned Epidemic Cave and I've mentioned Groat Mandarin where the Neanderthals came back and that's what happened in Israel too.

Speaker 20 So we have evidence of Homo sapiens at places like Shkul and Cathsay 100,000 years ago but when we move on in time the Neanderthals are back in occupation of the area and sapiens seem to have disappeared for a while.

Speaker 20 So it wasn't all a one-way traffic And that changing environment, that changing landscape would have complicated the picture because some of those changes of environments might have benefited Homo sapiens and other changes might have benefited the Neanderthals.

Speaker 19 Chris, what I also found so interesting there is amongst all of those things that potentially they were competing for would be the best cave sites.

Speaker 19 And I'm guessing maybe not a limited number, but the best sites would have already been identified by Neanderthals.

Speaker 19 So could you imagine cave sites being a key area either where there was competition or or there were meetings between these two?

Speaker 20 Yes, certainly. Yes, these would have been in the landscape caves were important.
They were important shelters, gathering points, points of safety of course.

Speaker 20 And often these caves are very visible on the landscape because they're higher up, people can see them.

Speaker 20 Obviously if people are building a fire in there you'd have had a smoke signal showing that there's someone in the cave. So yes these would have been focuses of attention for both of the groups.

Speaker 19 So let's talk about interbreeding because this is the other amazing facet of research regarding this cooperation between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals when they start meeting each other.

Speaker 19 So what is this amazing research that has emerged revealing this mixing between the two species?

Speaker 20 Yes, so it's data from the last 15 years mainly.

Speaker 20 So we had the first bits of Neanderthal DNA, mitochondrial DNA, recovered back in 1997, incredibly, from the skeleton from the Neander Valley in Germany, the one that gave its name to the group, which was amazing.

Speaker 20 But that was only mitochondrial DNA and that had showed no signs of any mixture because it was from the mitochondrial DNA. The Neanderthals were distinct from anyone alive today.

Speaker 20 There was no sign of that Neanderthal kind of mitochondrial DNA in people today. So that reinforced the idea of a clear genetic separation between them.

Speaker 20 But as the data built up in the early 2000s, people started to reconstruct more of the whole Neanderthal genome.

Speaker 20 And in some of those, there was evidence of a greater complexity because it was clear that there were some populations of homo sapiens today, in fact the ones outside of Africa, they seemed closer to the Neanderthal in genomic structure than Africans did.

Speaker 20 And that's very strange to explain. Why? If there was no interbreeding, why would people outside of Africa seem closer to the Neanderthals than people who came from Africa? And of course that...

Speaker 20 led to the suspicion that those people outside of Africa had some Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, leading to this greater similarity.

Speaker 20 And in 2010, that was convincingly demonstrated because the first high-quality Neanderthal genome was reconstructed, mainly based on material from Croatia, from Vindya.

Speaker 20 And that showed that when we look at the genomes of people around the world today, people in Europe and Asia, Australia, the Americas, they have around 2% of Neanderthal DNA in their genomes.

Speaker 20 And that is thought to be there because of interbreeding that happened maybe... 50,000 years ago.

Speaker 19 And that's interesting. So us today, you, me, in this room, we have Neanderthal DNA in our blood, in our body.

Speaker 20 That's right, in our genomes, yes. So around 2% of our DNA comes from that interbreeding, maybe 50,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 And it means that people in Africa, in a sense, are less closely related to the Neanderthals than we are.

Speaker 20 So even though I would say we did not evolve from Neanderthals, incredibly, the Neanderthals are still partly our ancestors. So it's sort of...

Speaker 20 It seems contradictory, but you know, we didn't evolve from Neanderthals, but they are partly our ancestors.

Speaker 20 because today people have calculated that there could be as much as 40% of the Neanderthal genome around.

Speaker 20 If you take all the Neanderthal DNA today surviving in the world in our genomes, if you put it all together, it might reconstruct as much as 40% of the whole Neanderthal genome.

Speaker 20 And so, interestingly, there's far more Neanderthal DNA around today because there are billions of us. than there was at the time the Neanderthals were alive.

Speaker 19 But Chris, it's also so interesting because if it is not just conflict and competition for resources, but as the science proves, there's evidently mixing and cooperation between Neanderthal groups and Homo sapiens when they're arriving.

Speaker 19 Why ultimately then do Neanderthals lose out in this interbreeding, in this cooperation element with early Homo sapiens?

Speaker 20 Yes. So, of course, that brings us on to the question of how the interbreeding happened.
And obviously, if we go down to the details, we obviously know how it happened on a one-to-one basis.

Speaker 20 And Neanderthal mated with the Homo sapiens. But when we move on to how that was happening, what was the process before that happened?

Speaker 20 We don't know, of course, how many of these conflicts were friendly and how many might have been more hostile. And we will learn more about this.

Speaker 20 But it's quite possible, of course, that there were at times, if the groups had been on the landscape for long enough and adapted to the presence of the other groups, they might have exchanged partners in a peaceful way, as modern hunter-gatherer groups do at times.

Speaker 20 They exchange partners peaceably, and it's a kind of negotiated thing to exchange partners. So that could be what happened in some places.

Speaker 20 But of course the other possibility is what we see sometimes in hunter-gatherer groups and sometimes in say chimpanzees and so on. You will see a group of males who run out of female mates.

Speaker 20 They will raid another group and steal some females. And of course that could have happened as well.

Speaker 20 Maybe some of these pioneering groups, largely males, actually stole some Neanderthal females and brought them into their group and then they interbred with them.

Speaker 20 And thus Neanderthal DNA was introduced into Homo sapiens in that way.

Speaker 20 So not necessarily a nice start to the process but certainly those babies were then successfully brought up in the Homo sapiens groups and ultimately integrated with the Homo sapiens groups and through later generations that Neanderthal DNA, a lot of it disappeared.

Speaker 20 So it seems that within a few thousand years, most of the Neanderthal DNA that had been acquired had been selected away. But bits of it were actually enhanced and became more common.

Speaker 20 And that's a very interesting area, of course, but it suggests that some of these bits of Neanderthal DNA could have been advantageous for our homo sapiens people 40 or 45,000 years ago.

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Speaker 19 So it seems that the interbreeding is more successful within Homo sapiens groups than within Neanderthal groups.

Speaker 19 And do we think that is just like, could there also be a physical bodily structure reason for that too?

Speaker 20 Yes, I mean, that's one of the interesting questions. So obviously, we know there was...
a two-way exchange of DNA maybe 300,000 years ago between us and Neanderthals.

Speaker 20 But at that time, the lineages, of course, were more closely related. They were closer to the common ancestor.

Speaker 20 But by the time we get to 60,000 or 50,000 years ago, the groups had diverged even further genetically and physically.

Speaker 20 And so it's possible, and this is one of the strange things, when we look at all the early Homo sapiens fossils that we've got, all of them have signs of Neanderthal interbreeding in that period between 40 and 50,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 And whether we're looking at China or whether we're looking at Europe.

Speaker 20 But when we look at the Neanderthals from the same time period, oddly, none of them show any signs of recent Homo sapiens interbreeding.

Speaker 20 Now that might mean that it only went one way, that the groups for some reason didn't tolerate interbreeding with each other in one direction or the other.

Speaker 20 So whereas the sapiens were tolerant of Neanderthal interbreeding, maybe the Neanderthals were not tolerant of sapiens coming into their group and interbreeding with them.

Speaker 20 That's possible, but it's also possible there were incompatibilities. And these could have been genetic incompatibilities.

Speaker 20 There's some recent work that suggests that Neanderthals had some distinct blood groups from homo sapiens, including in the rhesus system. So possibly there were some genetic incompatibilities.

Speaker 20 When a Neanderthal mother in her own group was trying to give birth to a hybrid baby, maybe those births were less successful. But there also could be physical reasons.

Speaker 20 The pelvic shape is different between Neanderthal females and Homo sapiens females, and the Neanderthal head shape of a baby is slightly different to a sapiens baby's head shape.

Speaker 20 So possibly the birth process was more complicated for a Neanderthal mother to give birth birth to a hybrid baby than from a Homo sapiens mother to give birth to a hybrid baby.

Speaker 20 So that also could have been part of the process. But ultimately, largely, it's movement of DNA in one direction into homo sapiens.

Speaker 20 And that's also bad news for the Neanderthals, because I've mentioned that they're low in numbers and they're also losing their prime age individuals. We don't know if it's male or female or both.

Speaker 20 into the sapiens groups. So they're losing prime age breeding individuals into the homo sapiens groups and that depletes their own gene pool.

Speaker 19 They can't be replaced.

Speaker 20 That's right. They're losing people and they can't replace them.

Speaker 19 So do you think that the arrival of homo sapiens on the scene is either the catalyst or the cause for the extinction of Neanderthals?

Speaker 20 Well, yeah, I think it's it's impossible to say how much of it was purely down to us, but I think it's a combination of things.

Speaker 20 There also was climate change going on and there were some severe cold shocks in this period between 40 and 50,000, which actually impacted both groups.

Speaker 20 But interestingly, there is some evidence of exchange of information between the groups as well, because some of those early Sapiens groups at 45,000 years ago seemed to be adapting quite well to cold conditions.

Speaker 20 They're already, some of them, in really quite cold conditions. And it's possible that that is a sign that they picked up some Neanderthal adaptation.

Speaker 20 So the Neanderthals were, of course, well adapted to cold conditions culturally the kind of stone tools you need, the best animals to get for skins to wear, how you process the skins, all of those things perhaps could have been useful.

Speaker 20 So by taking in Neanderthal members into their groups, they could have picked up some of that Neanderthal knowledge of how to live in the cold. And that would have been very useful for homo sapiens.

Speaker 20 And genetically, the genetic inheritance was also useful because it seems that a lot of our immune systems outside of Africa have elements of Neanderthal DNA in them.

Speaker 20 And that makes sense because, of course, we had evolved in Africa with African diseases and pathogens and so on.

Speaker 20 Coming out of Africa into Western Asia and then into Europe, we were going to be encountering new diseases, new pathogens and so on.

Speaker 20 The Neanderthals had evolved in those areas for hundreds of thousands of years. They would have had genetic defenses to those diseases.
We didn't have them.

Speaker 20 By interbreeding with Neanderthals, we got a quick fix to our immune system. So that was also an advantage for us.

Speaker 19 But on the flip side, maybe certain groups of Homo sapiens, could they have been bringing diseases with them from Africa that Neanderthal groups who they encountered and maybe were cooperating with, but as a side effect, they were more vulnerable to those diseases.

Speaker 20 Yes, I mean, it could have been a two-way process. Once they're mixing, of course, diseases will go either way.
And in both cases, there could be immune problems that you won't have the immunity.

Speaker 20 So it could have affected Neanderthal numbers.

Speaker 20 If they were also small in number and Neanto numbers were shrinking and homo sapiens numbers were increasing, again, that would have had a bad impact on the Neanderthals.

Speaker 20 But as a parallel, some people have thought, yes, you think of the way smallpox decimated populations in the Americas and in australia when it was brought there by people traveling from europe we tend to think of that but of course these were diseases that spread in large numbers of people in urban centers so in those cases the populations are closely packed together and it's much easier to transmit the diseases when we go back to 50 000 years ago populations are more scattered and living in smaller numbers so i think that purely disease is not going to be enough of an explanation in the situation we're in because these populations are small in number and they're spread out more.

Speaker 19 So let's go to the end and you mentioned Gibraltar earlier and I'd like to revisit Gibraltar now. So roughly 40,000 years ago the Neanderstors have either gone or on their very, very last legs.

Speaker 19 But geographically, topographically, Gibraltar, you know, this great rock, this fortress at the southern toe of the Iberian Peninsula, overlooking the entrance into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean.

Speaker 19 As a story, people love this idea of Gibraltar as this stronghold, maybe like that last enclave for Neanderthals before they go extinct. How credible is this?

Speaker 19 And what information is there for Neanderstoles in Gibraltar at this late stage?

Speaker 20 Neanderthals certainly thrived in Gibraltar for tens of thousands of years. And we've got a number of sites where they were living.
And I've worked at Van Gogh Cave and Goram's Cave there.

Speaker 20 And of course, we've got DNA from the Forbes Quarry Neanderthal and the Devil's Tower.

Speaker 19 And those are all sites in Neanderthal.

Speaker 20 So these are all sites in Gibraltar. So Neanderthals certainly were were thriving at times in Gibraltar.

Speaker 20 It's, of course, a relatively benign environment, while further north, there would have been, you know, much, much worse conditions, much colder conditions.

Speaker 20 Gibraltar and the whole of the south of Iberia would have been at times a refugium in which Neanderthals could survive.

Speaker 20 And I mentioned the similarity between the DNA of the Forbes Quarry Neanderthal from Gibraltar and Thorin's DNA.

Speaker 20 So there's that connection which we can pick up in Thorin maybe 50,000 years ago between Gibraltar and the Rome Valley.

Speaker 20 But although it's been claimed that Neanderthals survived even down to 30,000 years ago in Gibraltar, and I was actually, my name's on a paper that suggested that 20 years ago, I think the data now show that there's no evidence Neanderthals survived any longer in Gibraltar than they survived anywhere else.

Speaker 20 And I think they were gone from there by 40,000 years ago. And I know it's claimed that, you know, this benign environment in Gibraltar allowed them to survive longer.

Speaker 20 But of course, that benign environment would have been attractive to homo sapiens as well. And we know there were homo sapiens in southern Iberia 42,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 So I don't know what would have kept them from going to Gibraltar if it was such a nice environment. So I personally don't think Gibraltar has any evidence to be the last stronghold of Neanderthals.

Speaker 20 It could have been one of their last strongholds. But equally, I've mentioned that we really don't have data from many areas further east for when the Neanderthals disappeared.

Speaker 20 So they could have survived longer there, but maybe they survived in pockets further east that we haven't yet discovered.

Speaker 19 I will ask about Britain, last of all. I mean, do we have much evidence for the last Neanderthals in Britain from the archaeological record?

Speaker 20 There's not as much evidence from Britain as we would like to have for the last Neanderthals.

Speaker 20 So we have evidence of their stone tools at sites that go back to probably certainly 45 or 50,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 In Jersey, there's intriguing evidence on the island of Jersey of a population that might even have had mixed Neanderthal homo sapiens features.

Speaker 20 So there are some teeth which were thought to be Neanderthal teeth discovered more than a century ago in La Côte de St. Brelad.

Speaker 20 But we studied them recently and intriguingly there are two different individuals and both these individuals in their teeth show features that we think are typical both of Neanderthals and of Homo sapiens.

Speaker 20 And they're roughly 45,000 years old. So that's exactly the time when there might have been a mixed population.

Speaker 20 So not much evidence as we would like, but it's possible there was even a kind of mixed heritage population on Jersey about 45,000 years ago.

Speaker 20 And when we come back to mainland Britain, we've got evidence now from Wogan Cavern. So Wogan Cavern is a fantastic site situated under Pembroke Castle.
It's quite a site. It is quite a site.

Speaker 20 And I think you've been there, haven't you? So you know what it's like. But that site has evidence of early Homo sapiens occupation.
So there's even an LRJ point.

Speaker 20 Now this industry, Vincumium Ranovitsian, Yermanovitzian, this is an industry which we know typifies typifies a homo sapiens expansion in Europe about 45,000 years ago, which is present in places like Chechia, is present in Germany, is present in Belgium, and it's present at Wogan Cavern.

Speaker 20 So this was a spread of sapiens previously undetected, probably about 45,000 years ago, reaching right over into Western Britain. And were the Neanderthals still there at that time?

Speaker 20 Well, we can't be sure, but I think Wogan Cavern will be one of the places that will show the evidence of that or not.

Speaker 19 Chris, this has been absolutely fantastic. Is there anything else you'd like to mention before we wrap up about the last Neanderstoles and this facet of Neanderstol history?

Speaker 20 I don't think there's anything particular, but obviously watch this space because in the next year we're going to see yet more fantastic publications about this period of time between 40 and 50,000 years ago.

Speaker 19 Brilliant, Chris, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Speaker 20 Thank you.

Speaker 19 Well, there was Professor Chris Stringer, Oracle of Neanderstool and Homo sapiens studies, explaining all about the last Neanderstles. I hope you enjoyed the episode.
Thank you for listening.

Speaker 19 The fourth and final episode of our Ice Age series will be out next Sunday, Saturday for those of you who are subscribers, where we will explore the end of the Ice Age, the big melt, but also this unusual period where the climate started getting colder again, known as the Younger Dryas.

Speaker 19 That episode will be coming next weekend. In the meantime, please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Speaker 19 Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.

Speaker 2 Hi, this is Robert Mays from the Athletic.

Speaker 4 This time of year always gets busy, but that's when having Peloton in my life really makes a difference.

Speaker 7 The new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, helps me fit in great workouts no matter what's on my schedule.

Speaker 5 It's Peloton's most advanced equipment yet, giving you real-time guidance and endless ways to move.

Speaker 9 Peloton IQ plans your workouts, tracks your progress, and corrects your form so you can train smarter and make the most of your time.

Speaker 10 Let yourself run, lift, flex, push, and go.

Speaker 2 Explore the new Peloton Cross-Training Tread Plus at onepeloton.com.

Speaker 12 This holiday season, millions of families will pack their bags, load up the car, and head off for a family vacation.

Speaker 14 But not every trip is going to be somewhere fun.

Speaker 15 The American Red Cross responds to about 7,000 emergencies during the holiday season alone, from home fires to natural disasters, providing families a safe place to go when the unthinkable happens.

Speaker 17 But they can't do it without your support.

Speaker 15 Please donate at redcross.org.