For hundreds of thousands of years Neanderthals have roamed the lands of what is today Europe and western Asia. But how did they survive, and what caused their decline?Tristan Hughes delves into the fate of the last Neanderthals and continues our Ice Age mini-series with Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum. They explore how Neanderthals thrived across diverse climates and investigate the intriguing story of Neanderthals' eventual decline alongside the arrival of Homosapiens 60,000 years ago. Professor Stringer also shares the fascinating evidence of interbreeding that has left traces of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans and groundbreaking insights from recent archaeological and DNA research, that shed light on why Neanderthals went extinct.Presented by Tristan Hughes. The audio editor and producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: What are Neanderthals and where did they live?
They lived in caves, these natural places of shelter. They carved effective tools out of wood, ancillar, bone and stone. They made art. They lit fires. They had their own methods of communication, although what they were, we don't know. 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.
One that would come into direct contact and potentially conflict with Neanderthals. Homo sapiens. Us. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're continuing our Ice Age mini-series this February by exploring the enigmatic story of the last Neanderthals and why they ultimately went extinct. This is a really exciting field.
Over the past few years, new information has come to light thanks to a mix of archaeological and DNA research, revealing how late Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred some 50,000 years ago. Many of us in the world today have Neanderthal DNA in our genomes. Yet the Neanderthals themselves soon went extinct.
Many reasons have been put forward as to why this occurred, closely linked with the arrival of modern humans in their territories. 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.
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 Britons to the mysterious story of a massive cranium discovered in China called Dragon Man. Now he's back to explain the story of the last Neanderthals. Enjoy. Chris, as always, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
It's a pleasure to be with you again.
Now, you're a very modest man, but you are one of, if not the oracle when it comes to Neanderthals. You've been in this field of research for decades, so very, very grateful for your time. 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?
It's 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?
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Chapter 2: How did Neanderthals adapt to different climates?
Chapter 3: What evidence do we have of Neanderthal interbreeding?
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 Britons to the mysterious story of a massive cranium discovered in China called Dragon Man. Now he's back to explain the story of the last Neanderthals. Enjoy. Chris, as always, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
It's a pleasure to be with you again.
Now, you're a very modest man, but you are one of, if not the oracle when it comes to Neanderthals. You've been in this field of research for decades, so very, very grateful for your time. 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?
It's 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?
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. We have a lot of them with archaeology. So Neanderthals made characteristic stone tools, which we can recognize. 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. That's huge. That's the length of Eurasia. It's a huge area. Absolutely. It's possible they even extended into places like China at times, but that's not so certain. 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.
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. 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.
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Chapter 4: What led to the decline of Neanderthals?
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. The sediments in those caves may well contain their DNA as well.
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. And it seems similar with Neanderthals in the fact that there must be so much DNA out there from... pee, from poo, from where they ate and stuff.
So much more to gain to learn about them from just doing more studies of those sites that we know Neanderthals were once in.
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.
So you mentioned 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals, they occupied this huge geographic range stretching from modern-day Europe all the way to Eastern Asia. So were there almost different lineages of Neanderthals by that time? So you have Neanderthal as that wide-reaching name, but almost, is it subspecies beneath?
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. But what's interesting is that the picture we have of the late Neanderthals is that there's actually quite low diversity. So a lot of those early lineages have either disappeared or we haven't found their traces of them yet.
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. So they're having to breed with close relatives, which is not good for the gene pool, of course.
So we think that in the last 20,000 years, the Neanderthals were relatively low in diversity, probably relatively low in numbers.
And those last 20,000 years, do you mean between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago when you have that last evidence for Neanderthals in the world?
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Chapter 5: How does genetic diversity affect species survival?
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 Neanderthals before we move on to the arrival of Homo sapiens and that impact on the Neanderthal numbers. First of all, the toolkit.
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 Oldowan with very early human species to the hand axe of Homo erectus. With the Neanderthals and the late Neanderthals, how complex is their toolkit by then?
Yeah, so, well, you really need an archaeologist to answer that one properly. 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 quite a big behavioral 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 learned in the last 20 years is Neanderthals were doing a lot of the things that we used to think were probably unique to Homo sapiens. So this behavioral gap has considerably narrowed. Some people think it's disappeared completely. I don't go that far, but they were very capable technologically.
So, yes, they were largely making stone tools, of course, was their main way of making stone.
things for food processing and weapons but of course it wasn't the only material 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 there are a few rare examples where we find wooden artifacts but that must also have been important for them so for example we know that they were making wooden spears
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Chapter 6: What technological advancements did Neanderthals possess?
So this could be an early and 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. But it was one which then disappeared and the Neanderthals come back.
But interesting, 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.
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. 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. So that's still a mysterious and poorly understood time. But that epidemia fossil from Greece is maybe a clue to the sort of movements, early movements out of Africa, which ultimately were not sustained by Homo sapiens.
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, so for much of the time they were separate from each other.
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. We and the Neanderthals evolved separately, but 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. And this is a pattern which we now know from modern species that are closely related. So when we look at birds and mammals, maybe 20% of these closely related species are doing a bit of interbreeding with each other.
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. So by interbreeding with your neighbouring 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.
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. 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 and even Denisovans and Neanderthals were interbreeding with each other.
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Chapter 7: What were the physical differences between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens?
Chapter 8: How did climate change impact Neanderthal populations?
That's right. Yes. So there are neontal sites where even from the mitochondrial DNA preserved in the cave sediments, as well as in the individual's DNA themselves, you can show this pattern of small diversity in the males of the neontals compared with large diversity in the females.
There's this Neanderthal world that's existing some 60,000 years ago. Let's introduce our other main protagonist into this story, protagonist species. Chris, when do we start to see Homo sapiens emerging onto the Neanderthal scene?
Well, yes. So that's an interesting question where, again, we're getting new data all the time. 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, Epidema Cave. It's actually a complex of caves stacked vertically in a sea cliff.
in southern greece 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 but i've been involved in work which has shown that first of all the skulls are not the same age 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. 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. 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. And what's interesting is maybe 30 or 40,000 years later, you got a Neanderthal fossil at the site. So the sapiens seems to have disappeared and the Neanderthals are in occupation.
So this could be an early and 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. But it was one which then disappeared and the Neanderthals come back.
But interesting, 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.
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. They seem to pick up a sapiens like mitochondria and Y chromosome.
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