Neanderthals

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

And I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Hominid Cage.

One of the things that I love about science is just the speed of change.

Things are always changing.

Books go out of date, for instance.

For instance, my Jim Al Khalili book of home alchemy is an absolute waste of time and led to a lot of burnt pans.

And I would also say my Jim Al-Khalili book of cold fusion was less than impressive, where it just said all you needed were two cornettos, a bag of oven chips and a swing ball set.

It didn't work.

In fact, even proper books by scientists that aren't just on the telly, you know, sometimes they go out of date.

Thank you.

Today we broadened the definition of the cage to include all hominids because we'll be talking about Neanderthals to whom we are all related.

Except possibly me.

Brian's related to them because he is the hairy one, but I'm related to whatever those ones on BBC Four documentaries, those little bald ones are.

Homo floresciensis.

Homo fluorescent.

No, yet again, I meant Jim Al Khalili.

One of the great changes, of course, in our Neanderthal knowledge means that the Your Mama joke has changed.

For instance, as many of you will know now, the traditional Your Mama joke is Your Mama is so Neanderthal, which frankly came as a surprise to scientists in 2013.

In today's show, we'll find out what many have imagined to be our lumbering distant cousins were actually artists, inventors, scientists, and lovers.

The discovery that we share at least 2% of our DNA with our Neanderthal ancestors has revolutionised our understanding of our distant past.

So today we ask, far from being inferior, were Neanderthals in fact our equals?

And if so, why are we here whilst they're not?

We're joined today by three people who dig for knowledge, two to understand life on Earth and one to give it the necessary punchline.

And they are.

Hi, I'm Rebecca Rag Sykes.

I'm an archaeologist and the author of Kindred, a book about Neanderthals.

And the thing I would really like to know about Neanderthals is what did they have in their pockets?

Is we don't know how they carried stuff around.

It's basic, but we have no idea.

I'm Tori Herridge.

I'm a paleobiologist and I'm based.

Well, right now I'm based at home, but I'm normally based at the Naturalistry Museum in London.

And the thing I think the next big question we're going to have to ask about Neanderthals is: do we really know how far they've spread across the world?

Are there places that we haven't found them yet?

And I'm particularly interested in whether or not they could get to islands.

Hello, I'm Anna Davis.

I'm a comedian, an actor, and a regular panelist on QI, and I've recently published my memoir, Just Ignore Him.

And the thing that I would like to know about Neanderthals is: did they wear really big hats?

And will we ever find one?

And this is our panel.

Rebecca, when we were growing up, I suppose Neanderthal almost became synonymous with sort of a lumbering kind of, you know, something that was not particularly intelligent and so on.

But how, given what we know now, how should we picture a Neanderthal?

It's interesting because people are still quite happy to use Neanderthal as a slur.

Although really, for the past 30 years, I think the picture of Neanderthals has shifted, even in popular culture.

People are quite aware and sort of happy to say, Oh, yeah, Neanderthals, they weren't as stupid as we used to think, were they?

But the detail of Neanderthal life is the thing that really has not sort of filtered out so much.

And people perhaps do still see them as a bit backward, maybe not wearing some clothing that was quite nicely tailored, unlike the clever Homo sapiens after them.

Whereas, I think, really, what you should think of when you think of a Neanderthal in your mind is a hunter-gatherer, supremely well adapted to whichever environment they were in, whether it was cold or warm, like it is today.

And Tori, you're an expert on woolly mammoths, amongst other things.

And I just wonder, where is the overlap then in terms of the understanding of the mammoth and the understanding of Neanderthals?

Where do we find that kind of that shaded area?

Well, that's actually a really interesting point you make there, because in some ways, fossil elephants in general are a really wonderful parallel for human evolution.

So, elephants have been the constant companions of humans since the get-go.

They've got the shared oranges in Africa.

Pretty much every site with a fossil human in has got a good chance of having an elephant in it, too.

Because elephants, you know, but they're a species which now we've only got two African elephants, two species of African elephant, and one species of Asian elephant.

We think of them as not being this global phenomenon, but you only go back 100,000 years, you had elephants all over the world, apart from Antarctica and Australia, different kinds of species, different groups, and they've all gone extinct in the same way that all other hominids have gone extinct and left us with just one, us.

So, for the millie mammoth point of view, understanding the history of the woolly mammoth is really, really similar to understanding our history and the Neanderthal history.

It's so many similar questions because they all relate to the same period of time and the same climatic changes that were faced by Neanderthals and were faced by woolly mammoths and the woolly mammoth ancestors.

There is the key question, though, what did they taste like?

That's you know, delicious, I think.

I mean is it

the case that rather like in North America where there were vast herds of buffalo and

humans would follow them around and live off them really?

Do you think that was the case with where there are very large herds of these animals?

And if you get one that's a lot of food and a lot of other raw materials,

so you kind of attach yourself to them.

I think I mean that's certainly definitely a quite likely scenario.

I mean humans are clever, Neanderthals were clever.

Becky Becky will go into that in more detail.

But I mean, a single mammoth, I mean, if you think, a woolly mammoth, one of the things you have to get your head around first of all is that a woolly mammoth is about the same size as an Asian elephant.

So it's not bigger than that.

So it's the same size as an Asian elephant.

But that's still really, really big.

So let's say a medium-sized mammoth might weigh about three tons, just over three tons or something.

That's about like three and a half million calories.

That's a lot of calories.

You could basically feed 800 hunter-gatherers for a day or a tribe for a month.

Once you've got this thing, you've brought it down somehow, you've erected a trap or dug a hole or got a really good spear or however you've got it, pushed it over a cliff, then you can't really go anywhere, can you?

It's three tons.

You've got then got to camp around it until you've used it all up.

Yeah, or you can transport it.

No, no, exactly.

That's actually really, really interesting.

And one of the most fundamental things is going way back before Neanderthals, so I apologise, but it's really interesting that elephant carcasses, so ancient elephant carcasses, and human stone tools are really closely associated.

And one of the questions that's come up again and again and again is: could elephants in some way, or at least elephant corpses, sorry again, the doorboy just rang, could elephants in some way, or elephant corpses, have acted as a focal point for humans coming together, a focal point, a place where you could start to form a social species?

Because these are places where great

accumulations of carnivores and scavengers can assemble and not compete because it's a place of plenty.

There's enough for everyone.

You can have kind of positive interactions.

You can have friendships form.

You aren't sparring or fighting over resources.

By the way, I should have mentioned for anyone listening, the doorbell was for repetition of elephant.

But it was.

Alan, were you one of those children who was fascinated in these ideas of woolly mammoths?

Because I love those kind of books.

I think so, yes.

And there are certain words that I think of as from childhood, like woolly mammoth.

And another one is saber-toothed tiger.

The sabre-tooth was a big part of 70s Essex.

Everyone knew about the sabre-toothed tiger.

We knew about nothing else from the past but we knew that there had been sabre-toothed tigers.

But did you know that there were once scimitar-toothed cats in Essex?

Well no, you see, and this is one of the problems with Essex, is that we know almost nothing about ourselves.

So Alan, I'm...

I'm fully confident to go on talking anyway.

I'm an Essex.

I'm from Essex.

I knew there was a reason why I liked you.

Yeah, I'm from Essex.

I'm from Essex.

And I did not know any of this growing up at all.

I had no idea.

No idea whatsoever.

A scimitar tooth is different from a sabre-tooth in what way?

It's slightly more.

So there's two, so the typical sabre-toothed cat is what's called Smilodon, and that's the classic one that we mostly associate with North America.

Because there's loads of, I know, is the great, and that's probably really long things.

There was another kind of.

There's a mafia character.

Yeah.

And then there was another type of saber tooth or scimitar tooth because it was a more serrated, had a serrated tooth and sort of chunkier, so less sort of long and sort of curvy, but sort of chunkier, but seriously poking down, sort of with loads of sort of serrated knives, like a steak knife all along the edges of it.

Belonged to a big cat called Homotherium.

And that was present in Britain, I think, about 500,000 years ago, before then.

And may have persisted later.

There's some really late surviving fossils from the North Sea, but they've got controversial dates in it.

But it's just amazing.

Now, I didn't have any of this idea of this, you know, as you say, hippos in Britain.

It just wasn't anything that I knew about.

And Essex hasn't got the most interesting geology, but it's got a lot of ice age, and I had no idea.

All those gravel pits from

the table was.

We talked about Bodicea or Boudicca, as she's now known, and Dick Turpin.

That was basically

Dick Turpin, supposedly, had a hideout in Epping Forest, and there was a nightclub at Waltham Abbey called Turpins.

Where people would often fashion simple blades.

Not worth avoiding.

I just love that idea.

How shall we remember our history?

Well, in Berkshire, we're using a series of blue plaques.

In Essex, a series of nightclubs.

My favourite nightclub in Essex was one that was called Scenarios, which

quite what that implied.

going down scenarios

Rebecca, Tori mentioned

tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, in fact, hundreds of thousands.

Could you sketch out the time period that we're talking about when we're talking about the Neanderthal era and the interaction with woolly mammoths and so on?

What is that time period?

Yeah, so Neanderthals, they are not some sort of missing link between us and our common ancestors with chimpanzees, which were like six million years ago.

They are much closer in time to where we are.

So, Neanderthals begin emerging in an anatomical sense somewhere between 400 and 350,000 years ago.

Certainly, we believe that that was happening in Europe.

And in fact, our own species, Homo sapiens, appear to be sort of emerging in a similar way in Africa at about the same time.

So, we sort of have these two parallel lineages that go forward in time.

Neanderthals do their thing in Western Eurasia, and we do our thing in Africa.

And there is some interaction over that span of time.

We know that because of the genetic interbreeding evidence.

But by 40,000 years ago, it appears that pretty much everywhere, that is the end of when we see Neanderthals,

you know, in terms of the fossils, but also the archaeology that we associate with them.

So that's when they disappear.

Except, of course, they didn't disappear because they are still in us.

There is a genetic legacy in most people alive today.

Is it possible that they disappear because of a pandemic?

Well

should they have been social distancing?

They may have been too much social distancing.

I mean that's one of the explanations for why they may have disappeared that they were not actually as well connected in social network terms as homo sapiens.

But yeah the question of disease is really interesting.

I think a lot of people regarded it as a bit oh it's a bit fringe you know and we'll never know because most diseases leave no mark on the bones which is usually what we have unless we find a permafrost neatato but having lived through the past you know few months of of what's happened and seen okay we're a globalized world now but having seen sort of how one's world can be turned upside down by a novel pathogen, it does make me and I think other people sort of think,

perhaps that was something of what was happening.

And perhaps Denisovans, because you know, we don't know what happened to them either.

Denisovans are another hominin group more in eastern Eurasia.

Maybe they just had absolutely no defences, and something like that was involved.

It's an interesting picture, isn't it, of the world that you paint.

You mentioned the Denisovans as well.

So we see for hundreds of thousands of years a world where there are many hominin species around.

It's not just Homo sapiens.

No, what's now is just weird.

This is not normal.

And then that simplistic picture, I suppose there's an idea in many people's minds, in my mind, I think, as well, that the Homo sapiens came out of Africa and just out-competed or eliminated in some sense all the other species.

I get the sense from what you're saying, that that is certainly over-simplistic and probably not the case.

Yeah, I mean, what we know now, you know, the fact that Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago, that's kind of been known for a a while, although the dates have been sort of shifted slightly.

But it was assumed that the dispersal of homo sapiens also happened about the same time.

We kind of like surged out and just replaced Neanderthals.

And the debate was, well, did we encounter them?

Was it our fault?

Was there interbreeding?

So we know there's interbreeding.

But what has changed is the span of time over which we now know that homo sapiens were outside Africa is enormous.

You know, we know people are in Australia by 65,000 years ago, in China, somewhere between 80 to 120,000 years, and in the Near East, 150,000, 180,000 years ago.

So that's a huge amount of time over which they must have been encountering Neanderthals.

And we see that genetically.

We know that interbreeding was happening now and then, even before 200,000 years ago.

So the question is: if there is that contact over that huge amount of time, why did it take so long for Neanderthals to disappear?

And also for us to actually get into Europe?

Is it not the case also that it's not just Homo sapiens that are dispersing from Africa?

There's so many other species, predators, diseases,

mosquitoes, who knows what.

If the climate, if the temperature goes up,

other things can spread, can they not?

Yeah, I mean, certainly over that span of time, we're not looking at, you know, one ice age or whatever.

It was multiple cycles of warming and cooling.

So as warm or warmer than today, and then going into ice ages.

And over that time, you have to think of like slow-motion waves waves of animals coming and going.

You know, when it's warm, two to four degrees warmer than now, 122,000 years ago, you've got hippos in Yorkshire.

You know, they didn't just stampede there, it's a slow process.

They went on EasyJet

and they landed at Leeds-Bradford.

That won't happen after Brexit.

I guess.

Well, EasyJet have brought in a new fee, haven't they?

You're not allowed now to carry on a hippo.

You have to pay extra for it.

In those days, they had much bigger seats.

Still allowed armadillos, apparently.

You can still get those on EasyJet, mate.

I think that's a really, really...

The point Becky's making there is a really key thing that people have to first get their head around when they think about the world that the Neanderthals occupied, is that it isn't one world, it's many, many different worlds, and they persisted through it all.

So, you know, if you think like 400,000 years ago, you know, you get the first signs of Neanderthals, and at that point, the world was in a warm stage, which is just like today, right?

And we talk about these, so we talk about the ice age as a general term, it's not a very scientific term, but really that just refers to a period of the time when there's permanent ice at the poles, like today.

So we're still in an ice age, you know, we're just in a warm stage within this ice age of the last two and a half million years.

And for the last 800,000 years or so, we have been governed by a roughly 100,000-year cycle between cold stages and warm stages like today.

And that's entirely dependent-well, not entirely, but it's mostly driven by these great big orbital cycles of the way the Earth moves around the Sun and the way the Earth tilts on its axis and the way the Earth wobbles around that axis.

And they come together in these rhythms to create this 100,000-year cycle from cold to warm, from cold to warm.

And so, when we think of the andotoles as being an ice age animal, or woolly mammoths as being an ice-age mammal, it's not the full picture.

We're actually talking about a time of changing climates, of climates that went from very, very cold, where the ice could stretch all the way down, say, to the north of London in Europe, you know, see

it gets got to Finchley Road 450,000 years ago.

And then you've got periods of warm, as Becky says, where it could actually be warmer than today.

So the last interglacial, the last warm stage 125,000 years ago, was maybe up to four degrees warmer than today.

And yeah, hippos in Yorkshire, hippos in the Thames, lions in the Thames.

You know, it's it's it's these differences are extraordinary.

And Neanderthals persisted and did well through both cold and warm, and that's really interesting.

For most of that time, our species was in Africa.

I just wanted to ask you that before we move on to some specifics, just painting this picture of the Neanderthal world.

I mean, I know, as you've said, it stretches over hundreds of thousands of years, so maybe it's a rather broad question.

But I wonder whether you could just give a summary.

You know, in your book, you paint this picture of a you use the word there, a culture of, I I think you actually use the word a civilization that spanned from Europe all the way through into Asia.

So is it possible to paint a brief picture, a snapshot of what that world may have been like for them in particular?

Yeah, I mean, I think in the book I said they're a bit like the Roman civilization in that, you know, Rome was not one monolithic thing because the Romans just, you know, amalgamated whoever was there.

But in terms of their culture, around sort of 100,000 years ago in North France, there seems to be a whole blade culture that pops up.

Most of the time, Neanderthals are interested in using flakes.

They have very sophisticated ways of getting flakes from rock, many different ways of doing it.

They're very skilled nappers.

But one of the things that was claimed for a long time was that, oh, they didn't really go in for blades, and so they're a bit stupid.

They definitely did make blades.

And there's this particular thing in northern France that they seem to just suddenly start doing it a lot.

It becomes part of their normal repertoire of tools and then it goes away again.

There's another cold stage, another glacial that happens from about 80,000 years ago.

And after that point, that sort of weird blade culture is gone.

So, is that because it was extinct, or you know, did those groups actually disappear, or did they just change what they were doing?

But it's a really great example that there is diversity through time, and also we see it regionally.

Like Neanderthals in Eastern Europe had one way of making hand axes, two-sided tools.

Neanderthals in Western Europe, it was a totally different thing.

It's like, no, you do it like this.

No, no, no, no, you do it like this.

If you say flakes,

you don't mean the chocolatey kind.

Because I've had that in my head for the last.

You mean bits of stone?

Yeah, but you know what?

You can actually nap chocolate.

It fractures quite a lot like stone.

If you have a nice block of dairy milk and you sort of give it a whack, you can see the little sort of landmarks that we use to identify stone tools.

They're kind of similar.

Alan, do you find that is one of the problems where I was just thinking about that?

Because as comedians, you're listening and you're going, I'm enjoying this.

And then you hear the potential for a joke and you go, I can't hear anything else now.

No, that's it.

It's just ruined.

It's like kind of...

So, or images getting like the moment that Torrey said Finchley Road, all I heard was there'll be delays on the Jubilee line for the next 5,000 years due to the ice age.

And I'm trying to listen to the information, but my brain's going, you're not one of those people who understands.

You just.

It's an absolute chronic affliction.

And it's two afflictions.

It's one having the thought, and then it's the desperate need to voice it.

Which is why comedians are such an irritant on serious academic discussions.

But now everybody's learned that you can actually nap chocolate.

That's a serious situation.

I would never, until now, really, I've never met someone who's so confident with the verb to nap

without it meaning putting your feet up.

Yeah, yeah, nap with a K.

Nap with a K, which just means breaking something.

It means to make stone tools, yeah.

It's the action of producing stone artefacts, yeah.

I was just going to say, this is a perfect example.

The problem for the scientist in a discussion with comedians is to know when to stop the hilarity, because I know

you break the comedic flow and

they look at you with a very annoyed expression on their face.

But I have a joke, I've been saving this up for 20 minutes while you people talked about precision and science.

I've done it.

That's definitely the problem we have on QI.

Sometimes in comedy, it can take quite a lot of waffle before the, you know, it's a bit like panning for something in a river.

And you need, so you do need that time.

But this is different.

This is a more interesting science-y show, so I have to think you better, it better be pithy and quick, or you're just not going to get the time.

You're not going to get a run-up.

So, can you tell me, tell me when I'm allowed to ask Tori a scientific question.

You wait a minute, I'm going to have a little chat with Alan and then we'll come back.

Tori, we've talked about

in some detail, and I want to ask you as well, Rebecca, but first, Tori,

we find this, we reconstruct this history, quite detailed history.

As you said, we know the hippos in the Thames and also talk with some confidence about species that are now extinct.

So could you give an overview of how, what evidence we have and how we begin to build up this picture?

The great thing about working on the Ice Age is you've got an enormous record of material.

Like, we've got loads and loads and loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of fossils.

Fossils of big things, but also fossils of tiny things, like tiny shells of beetles and snails, and that give this really complex picture of the environment for this time period.

And we've still got a lot of it surviving.

So, it's not like, say, working on a time period from sort of several hundred million years ago where there's only a few places on Earth left which has got the rock record from that time period to work on.

If there's quaternary, this ice age period deposits all over the place.

So we've got a massive, a massive amount of data, more than we could ever deal with.

And then we can use basic techniques like stratigraphy, which is just the simple premise that if you can properly dig an area and be sure which layer is on top of which layer, which isn't always as easy as you think in a cave, for example, if you can be sure of that, you can be fairly confident that the stuff at the bottom is older than the stuff above it.

So you can get sequence of events at least.

And then becomes the absolute timing of events.

And that's when you get to dating, and that's when it can get a bit tricky because to put absolute numbers on things rather than just correlating one area with another area, with another area with another area, means you've got to use different types of techniques, and that depends on what you've got available to you.

And there are methods of varying precision, and there are methods of varying accuracy.

And if you can do lots of different methods, then you feel quite confident about it.

So, if you're working in caves, one of the great things you can use is a method of radioactive decay dating, again, but using a different isotope or two different isotopes, uranium and thorium.

You can use that to date the time at which, say, a salagtite or a stalagmite was formed.

And that's got great accuracy.

You can get really high precision on that.

Between, like, you know, you can date something 300,000 years ago within a few years, sometimes, you know, which is amazing.

And so

that's brilliant.

You can do that all the way back to about 300 and maybe sometimes 360.

Do you do that on the site or do you have to take the thing to a Do you take it away?

Yes, you have to go to, you have to take samples of the stalagmite or stalagtite.

We call it a speleotherm.

It's more general term.

It captures all the different kinds of calcite flowstone drapery that you might see in an amazing sort of stalactite cave.

You take a sample away and then you have to basically put it through a mass spectrometer to work out what the ratios of the various isotopes that window.

It's really fascinating, but as before,

I've been trying, I know that there's a joke in calcite flowstone, and

I don't know what it is, but I I think it's something to do with a very expensive kitchen worktop.

See, that's what I'm now trying to play the game of guessing which word has stopped you hearing everything else.

Because I thought it was drapery, I thought drapery was going to get you.

So that's

came after calcite flowstone.

I think it sounds like an Emerson Lake and Palmer album.

Calcite Flowstone.

Can you tell from the skeletons that you've that exist whether Neanderthals are stronger than humans?

I mean, if it kicked off.

That's a great question, Rebecca, because

again,

in your book, you talk in great detail about the anatomy and the strength and the physical stature of Neanderthals, and even

the internal sort of structure of a Neanderthal.

So that...

Answering Alan's question, but also the question, how do we know with just from bones?

Yeah, I think people, you know, when we talk about human evolution, people maybe have an idea that we just sort of got a few scraps here and there.

But actually, for Neanderthals, first of all, we found them first.

They were the first hominin that we ever realised existed over 160 years ago.

But we also have got enormous amounts of skeletal material for them.

We have thousands of pieces.

Probably overall, all these little bits represent something like 200 individual Neanderthals.

Some are more complete than others.

Some of them were talking just like, oh, there's a skull or a jaw in one cave, and that's one individual.

But we also actually have a lot of very

nearly complete or partially complete skeletons.

And it's enough that we can reconstruct the entire body

in great detail, simply from the bones.

And we also have individuals ranging from right across the ages.

So we have tiny, tiny little fragile newborn babies skeletons, which are very complete, which is interesting in itself.

Why are they so complete when they're fragile?

And we have it right through children, you know, toddlers, school-age, teenagers who do look a bit awkwardly adolescent, you know, they sort of look a bit growth-spurty.

And then you've got adults and even, you know, what we call elders, which are over 40.

But yeah, I mean, for hunter-gatherers, if you get to 50-60, you're doing pretty well.

But we do have that for Neanderthals too.

So we have the full range of of their lifespan and and yeah from just just from their bones we can see that they were they're a bit shorter than us um the body proportions are a bit different they're sort of a bit more um rounded and squat and that may be something to do with uh adaptation to colder climates because it's better to be sort of more like a round ball than something stretched out because it helps you keep your heat um

but um the other aspects of their body we can see for example the intensity of the bone's development that it's thicker and also the muscle attachment sort of markings on the bone.

We can see clearly that even as children, Neanderthals were very active, they were living intensive lifestyles, and they, you know, by the time they're sort of teenagers and adults, they would have been very strong.

Probably, I mean, I wouldn't want to, you know, have an arm wrestling match with one of them for sure.

But at the same time, they are not sort of just hulking brutes.

We can see that they had the ability, ability, and we see this from the archaeology as well, but we can see it in their hands, that

they could use their fingers for fine, dexterous things.

So they weren't sort of, you know, just lumps walking around.

They were just as full of physical prowess as modern athletes.

And certainly, some of the levels of activity that are implied do match, you know, Olympic-level athletes in terms of the amount of physical activity that we see from the skeletons.

Can I just ask you about this one particular remain you talk about in Kindred, which is Shanadar one.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

This incredible, where you basically describe the remains of something that had a Neanderthal who'd had arm crushed, some form of amputation, which actually looks like someone else did the amputation for them, bad hearing, all manner of infections, and had survived.

And this seems to be...

you know, two different things.

One, the possibility of having the ability to remove a damaged limb and survive.

Two, the idea that this Neanderthal would continue to be part of the tribe, someone who had been, you know, this idea of empathy.

I mean, it seems that there's a lot of different stories in this particular

yeah, he's fascinating.

I mean, he's like the unluckiest Neanderthal in the world.

He ran out the stuff that happened to him.

I can feel the cartoon film emerging.

Yeah, I mean, overall, if we look at Neanderthal bodies, a lot of them had some health complaint or, you know, an injury, but not all of them.

And not to levels that were more extreme than we might see in comparable hunting and gathering peoples, because it's hard to be a hunter-gatherer.

You know, you can just fall over a lot of chasing animals, break a leg.

We do see this in Neanderthals as well.

But this particular one from Shanidar cave in Iraqi Kurdistan,

yeah, he dealt with an awful lot.

He had some kind of terrible injury that crushed his side, including his face.

He may have sort of lost sight and an eye, loads of different stuff, but he did carry on living.

We don't really know how he lost the arm.

It could have been cut off,

it healed over basically.

But, you know, the question with him is, what level of care does it require to survive that?

Because certainly he would have been out of action.

for a considerable time.

And, you know, whether or not you might argue for sort of careful bedside nursing or not, certainly somebody had to have been bringing him food.

He would not have been fit to go on, you know, intensive hunting expeditions anymore.

Might it have happened when he was a child?

It happened in his youth, yes.

And then he continued onwards.

Um, and he lived long enough to get, you know, just normal arthritis.

He was certainly continuing as a member of the group.

We can see from the leg development that he was carrying on walking around and doing stuff.

Probably had a limp, but he was not a member of the group that sort of was just cast aside and then, you know, died.

He continued to be part of that community that he was in.

So that speaks to what we see from all of the other archaeological evidence of Neanderthals, that their society was actually based around sharing of resources.

It's a whole system about sharing and collaboration and cooperation.

Oh, yeah, going back to Shanodar 1, that's my favourite Neanderthal, I think.

And that's because it's I credit Shannon Darwin really as being like the moment at which I realised that Ice Age, the Ice Age, was something that was interesting and fascinating and could be connected to like sort of human stories.

And that's because I read a book as a teenager, as a young teenager, called The Can of the Cave Bear by Gene Owl, which a number of people may have read.

And that is basically the story of the Neanderthals that came from Shanodar Cave.

And Shanodar One is a character in that, but I didn't know that.

He was just a character I read, but then I was kind of, this is interesting.

And I went, you know, I bought it at Pitsy Market and I read this book.

I thought this is really fascinating.

And then I went shopping in Basildon the next week and I saw in a bookshop a book called Ice Age Art.

And I bought that because it was remaindered.

And I opened it up and there was Shannard Arcave with like this.

And it was like the things in this book were real.

It was the same map at the front of the Clan of the Cave Bears here.

And I realised, and I looked at the skirt, I was like, oh my god, it's creme.

You know,

it's the one-eyed, limping, one-armed Neanderthal.

And that was it, you know, that was it.

I wouldn't say it changed my opinion now, but it shaped my life.

And that's where I've ended up where I am today, studying the animals that I study today.

It took me down this route of the Ice Age in general, and I'm an evolutionary biologist, and so really what I do is I use the Ice Age to answer evolution questions.

And there are a lot more elephant skeletons than there are Neanderthals, an awful lot of people.

Well, I wanted to just

touch it because you're in the fortunate position in your field of having an intact mammoth, right?

There's a very famous discovery.

There are many, many, many.

Yeah,

and you so you have DNA from the mammoth and so on.

Does that mean soft tissue as well?

In that permafrost, the clue in the word perma, which has been frozen continuously since that time period, you don't just find the fossils as we do in, say, in Britain today, you actually find intact carcasses of Ice Age animals.

And there are a number of carcasses of woolly mammoths that have been found, and complete with fur, with skin, with flesh, with internal organs.

So I've held a mammoth liver.

It's just like, wow,

it's all bluffing.

And that is, it's just mind-blowing.

What would that mean for your field, Rebecca?

To have that kind of thing.

Oh, my goodness.

I think for me, you know, there's the genetics and all of the biology, and you know, what did they have in their stomach and all of that cool stuff?

But actually, like, coming back to what I said at the very beginning, you know, what's my big question about Neanderthals?

I said, oh, what did they have in their pockets?

And And yeah, finding a Neanderthal, being able to see what they carried with them, what were they wearing?

What was the stuff they had with them every day?

How did they carry it?

You know, did they have bags?

Well, they must have had bags.

What did it look like?

What does it tell us about their command of hide-working technology?

Did they have textiles?

Because there is a hint just from a recent discovery in a French cave that they may have had plant-based thread technology.

They may have been making threads.

The idea that we would have something that really

not only speaks to an entire species, but to just that everyday experience and that lived life of one individual Neanderthal, it would be absolutely incredible.

That would be the thing.

What's really going to date our society is that little window when everybody had an oyster card and now no one has an oyster card.

Alan,

we've run out of time.

There was so much, there's so much that we haven't covered in this.

It really is such a rich area.

But Alan, hopefully,

there's been things you've learned that you've enjoyed.

But I wondered now, from that conversation we had earlier, what at the end of the show is the thing where you think, do you know what?

I reckon there's 10 minutes of stand-up in that idea.

I think it is probably going to be the one whose arm fell off and

kind of limp.

I was still somehow going, come on, guys, just give me a bit of mammoth.

Come on.

I mean, what did he do to warrant a bit of meat?

And he must have been, maybe he could sing a song, or maybe you could do impressions.

He must have meant something.

See, have you got this?

Is how you feel as a performer?

I've got no actual useful skills, but they want me around for something.

As usual, we asked our audience a question as well, and today we asked them which prehistoric animal would you most like to be related to and why?

And so, Alison, Alison MacDonald here said, A giant sloth to prove that my lifestyle is absolutely the result of genetics.

This I think is very sweet.

This is from Glenn who just says, Nicholas Parsons, so his wit and charm could live on in me.

That's a beautiful kind of just-a-minute Jurassic Park crossover.

I like Bob Bennett's answer.

He just said Keith Richards.

Oh, here we go.

There's always a version of this, and I'm glad someone's found a way.

Martin would like it to be the sabre-toothed tiger because fangs can only get better.

So, thank you very much to our fantastic guests, who Torrey Herrich, Rebecca Ragsites, and Alan Davis.

Next week, we are looking at the science of food.

This will mean that because we're doing the science of food, my Swiss rolls will be tax-deductible for at least one week.

And also, we have basically a line-up of people who, as children, were told, don't play with your food, and have now turned it into a career

in much the same way that Brian was told by his teachers, stop just staring out of the window.

Where's that going to get you?

And it turns out

it's a job.

It's definitely a job.

Thanks for listening.

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