How Our Understanding of Neanderthals Changed in the Last Few Years

hello wonderful person this is anton and today we're going to go back in history and talk a little bit more about our cousins the neanderthals and one of the reasons i wanted to discuss this topic is because of all the recent discoveries and all of the recent advances in our understanding of how complex neanderthals used to be even compared to humans but a lot of this also relates to how different earth used to be back then today earth looks like this but approximately forty to fifty thousand years ago when the neanderthals were still around it was definitely an extremely different place and honestly i personally love playing around with these simulations trying to figure out what earth might have resembled back then we know that for example the levels of water were about 120 meters below what they are today mostly because a lot of water that used to be liquid froze over creating this extremely large ice shelf resembling something that you see right here and it covered a huge part of the planet but at the same time because of this it lowered the levels of water which at the same time exposed huge parts of the land that were inaccessible before this allowing ancient humans to travel from one region to another and this is exactly for example how ancient humans were able to reach australia something that probably happened around 50 000 years ago but in the last few days we've actually been also learning a lot about our own history and the history of our cousins the neanderthals which used to co-exist with humans in many of these regions you see on this map in europe and asia and this is essentially where various remnants of either neanderthals or their tools were discovered in the past few decades although initially most of these lands were actually inhabited by neanderthals humans didn't actually live there very likely because it was extremely difficult to adapt to these environments simply because this was basically all ice shelves and very inhospitable conditions but then for one reason or another about 40 000 years ago they all perished one of the previous videos that you can find somewhere right there does discuss this idea because it's also correlated with something that happened to our planet but if you'd like to find out more check out that video as well either way though within the next few thousand years after they perished all these regions were then replaced by humans which naturally made a lot of previous historians assume that maybe this was the result of some sort of a warfare where the humans won and the neanderthals lost but this was just an assumption and it doesn't actually have any proof as a matter of fact the genetic records along with the tools and a lot of other stuff discovered in those ancient caves kind of suggest almost the opposite it suggests that neanderthals and humans interbred and so in some sense shared genes with one another in the last few years there was also a lot of evidence suggesting that humans and neanderthals interbred and created a lot of different progeny award of children that would be in some sense mixed although there's also some evidence that the genes of male neanderthals would usually get attacked by the immune system of female humans and so some of these mixed children would actually not survive or possibly not even be born at all nevertheless today we know that about one to even four percent of everyone's dna on the planet and that includes asians europeans or even people living in africa has at least some dna that came from neanderthals for people in sub-saharan africa it's actually a little bit lower it's about 0.3 but for people in europe and for people in asia it can be up to about four percent although what that dna does inside of us is of course another question a lot of scientists do they believe that the dna left from the neanderthals is what you would call a non-coding dna meaning that it doesn't produce any proteins anymore although there's also some evidence that certain viruses and also certain problems that a lot of people experience with health could have come from the neanderthals as well and so the evidence for the gene mixing is definitely there especially this specimen right here that was found a few decades ago that represents a human with the highest dna from neanderthals the dna here was about seven percent you can learn more about this particular person that lived about 30 000 years ago by reading the article in the description but even though we all share the neanderthal genes it's kind of still important to understand what exactly this particular species was and how it lived on the planet and more importantly what made them perish for example we have no idea when exactly humans and neanderthals split into two different species it probably happened a few hundred thousand years ago but even that is not entirely clear and by the way if you ever wondered why we call them neanderthals it's because of the place where they were found originally back in 19th century in 1856 the first ever neanderthal was found in the neander valley in germany and that's basically where the name stems from and since the original discovery for pretty much decades and actually almost over 100 years the scientists have always believed that neanderthals were kind of primitive they might have been dumb they might have been british they might have had absolutely no skills whatsoever skills that we would call human skills and more importantly they probably produced some really strange grants and had no communication but in the last few years we discovered that pretty much all these assumptions were most likely completely wrong for example they had an extremely complex way to produce various tools they produced weapons they produced bowls and arrows they were also able to create relatively complex clothes and blankets they also had various cooking techniques such as roasting smoking boiling they developed various ways to store food they also developed various techniques for cooking including actually having the primitive kitchens that they had discovered in certain caves around europe they even had music and this is a picture of a flute that was discovered from essentially about 40 000 years ago they had a lot of interest in rituals they even buried their dead and seemed to possess a lot of different beliefs that most likely had to be communicated in some way they even found a way to use one of the more common trees in europe birch to produce different types of glue to then use that glue in various tool making so basically they were super super complex with some scientists even implying that their complexity was sort of on the verge of being more complex than actual humans back then there's even suggestions that they had seafaring capability being able to cross the oceans because some of the remnants were actually found on islands that were separated by water which altogether suggests that neanderthals were far from primitive they were actually by those standards pretty complex as complex if not more complex than humans and even the size of their brain was actually relatively similar to modern humans with the largest brain which is this skull right here known as a mood 1 being on average larger than most humans today although not all of the regions were larger they definitely had much larger occipital lobe responsible for vision which some scientists suggested were an adaptation to much darker regions in northern europe thus allowing them to see better which also would explain why their eyes on average were also larger as well but the part of the brain responsible for cognitive abilities was actually on average a little bit smaller than humans whereas the part of the brain responsible for physical activity and maintaining body control was on average larger which means that they were more physical than they were intellectual at least that's the implication from some of the modern studies but the biggest question has always been communication for many years scientists believed that they weren't really able to communicate with complexity at least they might have been able to produce some really simple sounds but were they able to communicate using complex speech like what i'm doing right now with you and finally a study came out analyzing and comparing the brains of neanderthals to modern humans focusing on the part of the brain where the speech is produced they study that as always you can find in the description below and according to the study well it seems that just like humans the neanderthals had extremely complex way of communicating and obviously hearing each other as well in other words it wasn't just simple grunts or simple sounds it was most likely speech with grammar and with complexity we might find in some of the early humans as well and to determine all this the scientists used the ct scans of different skulls of five different neanderthals and created the 3d models allowing them to compare them to human brain which also allowed them to model the structure of the ear in order to understand what kind of sounds they were able to hear today this is actually referred to as auditory bioengineering and by looking at different frequencies that they were able to perceive and comparing them to humans an even more ancient hominid known as sima de los huesos they were able to determine that neanderthals were able to perceive sounds in a relatively similar range as humans but still not exactly the same and this is where the interesting part comes in the neanderthals definitely had better hearing than some of the more ancient hominids specifically in frequencies of four to five kilohertz and overall their frequencies were quite similar to modern humans as well which implies that they probably relied on speech similar to humans but most of their sounds were in the range of about three kilohertz which generally corresponds to a lot of different consonants that our mouth can produce as well so for example one of these higher frequencies these are letters like these are very high frequency sounds which the neanderthals maybe did not perceive very well but a lot of other consonants like could have formed the majority of their speech and this is actually where it's super interesting because it would be amazing to hear their language one day i mean the way that these studies are going it's very possible for us to maybe one day even recreate what they sounded like but based on this we can also make an assumption that their communication was very different from some of the other cousins that we have such as gorillas whose speech or whose communication is predominantly bowel based they do not produce a lot of consonants and because they most likely had an ability to somehow communicate with ancient humans as well it means that there was definitely some sort of a relation going on between these species but the question of course is why did they actually disappear now one of the early explanations suggested maybe it was actually because of humans maybe we ended up just replacing them through violence but that's probably not correct all of the remains discovered from neanderthals suggested for the most part that their lives were usually short because they lived in extremely stressful environments with a lot of hunting of really large animals and competition with a lot of other species such as for example ancient lions and ancient bears but none of those injuries were from humans and even though they occupied a really large space in asia and in europe their numbers were never really that high their total population was around 20 to 30 000 at the peak and that means that well something was not really going well for them they never reached the point where they were the predominant species in the region and so a lot of modern studies actually suggest that they most likely perished because of two things first of all their genes eventually became too weak mostly due to a lot of interbreeding and just small numbers in general and by weakening the genome they then were just not able to adjust to the conditions that started to change now this kind of relates to the video i made previously which explores this in a little bit more detail but about 40 000 years ago a major cataclysmic event may have transitioned the climate of our planet to the point where the neanderthals just could not survive it anymore and because of these climatic changes they slowly perished eventually disappearing completely and unfortunately leaving nothing left except for some genes that are still inside of us because of the interbreeding that they did with humans early on but as the humans moved into their territory they replaced them completely eventually occupying exactly the same niche as the neanderthals in those regions and so overall the idea of learning about neanderthals their culture their language their history or even hearing their music all of this together would one day help us understand a lot more about our own evolution as well but there's also of course a lesson here the lesson of climate change and the potential demise of a species and that's of course something that we need to prepare for as well as history has shown earth does have a tendency to occasionally change climate for the worse and when that happens well let's hope that we're ready as well although for me personally the more interesting part of all of this is of course just trying to understand their culture and trying to understand what kind of people they were and what kind of life they lived especially because there's a little bit of them in all of us but that's something we might be able to discover in some of the future studies as well even though we've already discovered so much about them which helped us understand that they weren't really primitive at all they were really complex and possibly just as complex as the humans but anyway we'll actually talk more about all of this in some of the future videos until then thank you for watching subscribe if you still haven't share this with someone who loves learning about space sciences and in this case history and come back tomorrow to learn something else maybe support this channel patreon or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in description or by joining the channel membership as well either way stay wonderful and as always bye [Music] you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 237,095

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, universe sandbox 2, neanderthal, neanderthal history, who were neanderthals, neanderthal discoveries, humans vs neanderthals, neanderthal dna, dna, non coding dna, gene mixing, oase 2, neandertal, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, neanderthal complexity

Id: BvrBl9-TbBs

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021