September 10, 2022 • 50 mins
As recently as 40,000 years ago we lived among humans from an entirely different species – Neanderthals. About the same time our species showed up, Neanderthals suddenly vanished. Just what happened to the other guys? Did our ancestors do something … bad? Find out in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi friends, this is Josh and for this week's Select
I chose our episode on Neanderthals mayhaps the most misunderstood
hominin of all time. We long tended to think of
Neanderthals as loping dummies, but recent research questions that view,
and Chuck and I swoop in to defend them with
all our might leave the Neanderthals alone. Welcome to Stuff
(00:28):
You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and um,
this is stuff you should know, Stuff you should Nizzo.
(00:49):
I'm excited about this one. This just feels like classic
Josh and Chuck. I think so too. Took Took's gonna
make an appearance. Took Took, Mike make sweet of Hm,
which is always fun. And yeah, we like to watch
He's surprisingly tender, he is. I'm sorry. All the third
(01:12):
graders are actually, more to the point, the third grade
teachers who are standing there right now at the head
of class, They're like, oh, what happened to the Neanderthals?
Perfect for the classroom, right, So yeah, this is very Uh,
I thought this is very cool. I love this. But
we talked a little bit about Neanderthals in the past
and Homo sapiens and uh, Dennis Snovin's and that's right, right,
(01:34):
there's an extra in in there. I think Dennis Stovan's
Dennis Snoven sounds like a dude, like he manages ice
cream factory, right, Snovin, Dennis Snovin. Uh, this is good
stuff though, So let's let's treat everyone so all right,
we'll do our best. Put the pressure on. So neander
(01:55):
Neanderthals it really so? Then correct pronunciation is tall by
the way, Yeah, I had a teacher point that out,
remember very specifically in the in the ninth grade. Right,
but when you're being correct, you're actually speaking in Old German,
not even modern German. So it's really just a question
(02:16):
of how you want to say it. Either one's acceptable, no,
I mean the pronunciation would still be that in modern
German neander Tal Yeah, okay, because I saw it spelled
t a L two. Oh really yeah, let's get it
to that, h okay. I kind of like it. I
like how it looks, but I think it's up to
the individuals say taller thal. Okay, but the correct way
(02:36):
is neander tal, right, okay, and neander talls. I'm probably
gonna just switch back and forth. That's okay with everybody.
That is our way. Not to make a big deal
out of it or anything, but um, neander talls, uh
or thals, depending on who you are. They were a
species of human, beings of humans. Like, if you think
(03:00):
about it, chuck you, jerry me, everybody out there sometimes
nol Yeah, same species, one species of human. That's it.
Like you just don't really kind of think about that.
But if you dialed back a little bit, if we
got on the way back machine and went back just
like forty thousand years, there'll be at least one other
(03:22):
species of human running around on Earth. They would be
the Neanderthals. So we didn't even know that there was
another such thing as another human species until the eighteen
fifties because there was a forty year gap separating us
and then that's right, So the very first fossils of
a Neanderthal was found in eighteen twenty nine in Belgium
(03:43):
and then again in Gibraltar in eight But that kind
of were just like, oh cool, look at these old bones.
Wasn't a big deal. Wat's how easy they snapped on
my knee, right, they didn't know what they were. No.
And then in nineteen fifty six in Germany something pretty
significant happened. Uh. They found some pretty substantial fossils. I
think a whole skeleton. Actually, yeah, well they definitely found
(04:05):
a whole skull. Um. This was in four or five
ft of clay at in a limestone quarry cave in
a site called felt so Glad. And this is in
the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf. And this is where it
all comes around. If you hear the word Neanderthal or
at all um t h a l and Old German
(04:27):
means valley. And so the scientific name Homo neander tollensus
means humans from the Neander Valley. Yes, because that's where
the first one that we realized, Um, wait a minute,
this is This isn't a cave bear, this isn't like
some some dead person. This is a different species of human. Yeah.
(04:48):
They saw that the what we now know is classic
Neanderthal oval shape, that that big thick, low receding forehead
and brow very thick owns this. Uh, that was brought
to the query foreman, and he said it's a cave bear.
I guess he came over from Alabama. But he said,
(05:10):
but I do know a teacher and a guy who's
really into fossils. His name is Johann Karl full Wrought,
and here you can have these bones. He got them,
did some impressions. He went, what uh, did some castings
of these and sent those two Hermann uh Schaffhausen, a professor.
I don't know why German is so funny to you.
(05:32):
I don't either, but coming out of your mouth, it's
like it's just hilarious. After all these years. He's a professor,
was a professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn.
And they both were like, hey, this is significant because
this ain't no human uh, no Homo sapien. But it's
a human, right, we think, right, it's some other kind
of human, some other kind of hominid that we just
(05:56):
didn't understand before. So they presented their findings in the world.
He said like this, everybody get a load of this.
And there was an immediate problem with Neanderthals there there's
so this is eighteen fifties, eighteen fifty seven when they
prevented presented their fightings. And that was before on the
origin of the species. So before Darwin, it was like
(06:18):
God created all this, God created you, God created the panther,
God created the monkeys separately, like all this stuff was
all separate. And then Darwin came along and said, no,
all this stuff is actually related, and if you trace
everything far enough back, you're gonna find a last common
ancestor between two things that don't look anything alike, um,
including humans and apes. And so this was before that,
(06:43):
so it didn't fit into the Christian creation story. But
then even after Darwin came along, it just so happened
that Neanderthals were discovered and analyzed and and it was
realized that they were in different species of human at
a time when biological anthropology was around. Yeah, for oology
and the you know, we've talked about it on the
show a little bit, the very sort of racist practice
(07:05):
of um categorizing humans and their inferiority of races by
the shapes of their skull. Right, look at this skull. Um,
well there it's not not basically Western and European shaped.
We think it has some weird ridge. Um, so they're
an inferior race. They extended all that onto Neanderthals because
(07:29):
if you think, you know, if you're if you're comparing
like human Homo sapiens skulls to one another and somehow
finding inferiority or superiority in that in the shapes of
those When you compare a Neanderthal skull to a human skull,
clearly that human skull is much more refined and developed.
Neanderthals must have been these dim witted brutes the caveman. Like.
(07:51):
The whole reason we think of the caveman and Neanderthals
is big dummies and and oaths. It is because they
were discovered during a time of racist science. Yeah, and
that was the view that was held, and it's still
held by some people who don't know better. This is
why we're doing that, you know, one reason why we're
doing this episode. But it was held for a couple
(08:12):
of hundred years. But in the recent decades things have changed.
Our picture of the Neanderthal has changed because of science
and research, and we now know that, uh, well, a
lot of cool things. I don't want to spoil it yet, Okay, Yeah,
I was wondering if that was too much of the
beans getting out. I think so let's tease that out.
(08:34):
That's fine with Uh, we'll just sit here quietly for
a second as we go past this. Okay, all right,
we ready, yeah, alright. So the current story, like the
simple version of the current story, is the Neanderthal and
the I mean, should we just say the modern human
or that's how I was like, wow, because they're both humans. Yeah,
(08:56):
but they're just two different species of human sapience neandertal
and sapience. All right, So they separated between a half
a million and about six dred and fifty thousand years ago,
and they both diverge from a common branch um H.
Heidel bir Genesis virgensis. I think the g is hard.
I'm pretty sure that's right. H. Heidelbergensis. Yeah, all right,
(09:19):
that sounds right. Yeah, And this was in Africa, right,
that's where the divergence happened. That's right. Um. Then, so
either the division the divergence happened in Africa or some
Heidelbergensis state in Africa, and some spread out of Africa, yeah,
into the Old World in Asia, and over time, because
(09:43):
of the separation, these groups of humans started branching out
and developing into distinct species. One of the species. The
first one to develop into a distinct species from this
branch was Neanderthals, and by at least four hundred thousand
years ago, there were Neanderthals running around like distinct species
(10:07):
of humans called Neanderthals. Yeah, and they were developing independently
because they were very far from each other and they
didn't for a very long time, did not have very much,
if any, contact with one another. Yeah. Remember we did
an episode on speciation where like brown bears and polar
bears used to be the same bear, but the polar
bears started drifting further and further north, and they're actually
(10:29):
adapted to a different climate, different habitat, so much so
that they became a different species. That's the exact same
thing that we're talking about. Heidelberg ansis drifted into two
different parts of Africa and Europe, and the climate and
the habitat was different enough that it split into two
different species. Yeah. So what you've got in Eurasia is
(10:50):
a range from like Portugal and Wales in the west
over to like Siberia. This is for Neanderthals, right, yeah,
in the east. So that was their range in general,
and all the way down to the Middle East. Yeah,
it was a huge range, very big range. Um, the biggest. Uh.
They were shorter than sapiens that we're still in Africa.
(11:13):
They were kind of stockier, They had bigger brains. They
were by most accounts, stronger, more muscular, had wider hips
and shoulders, sturdier bones, very sturdy, just stocky, robust thing.
You would not want to mess with the Neanderthal. No,
and they were very adaptable. They they lived in very
cold environments. Uh, they lived in very sort of warm,
(11:34):
temperate environments. So it depends on the time. This is
what they think. They think that that range that was
so huge for the Neanderthals, there wasn't necessarily Neanderthals living
in all parts of that range at the same time
for four hundred thousand years or three fifty thousand years.
They think that over time, some Neanderthal populations died and
(11:56):
others came along and replaced them, and then some of
them moved down here and some of them were over here.
That they may have lived in different parts of the
world at the same time, but not necessarily their entire
range all at once for the whole three fifty thousand years.
They moved a lot, and nor did they move all
together as whole populations. There's a lot of local extinctions
(12:19):
and recolonizations going on right exactly. So it's almost like
if you could look at the map of eur Asia
on a time lapse over three fifty thousand years that
Neanderthals were around in the area, you would just kind
of see these little populations kind of growing and popping
and dissolving and then picking up again. And these are
actually new groups going into areas, becoming like dying out
(12:43):
for one reason or another. And then a thousand or
ten thousand years later, there's another group that says, oh,
this is a great spot and showing up kind of
like our real Atlantis episode. Remember there's like like twelve
feet of like fifty different settlements over a thousands and
thousands of years, because they're just like, this is a
great place to settle, but each one had no idea
(13:04):
that the last one was there. Same thing with the
Neanderthal range. So the Neanderthals are doing their thing all
over eur Asia. Meanwhile back in Africa and East Africa,
you've got the Sapien doing their thing, and then they
start to radiate out a little bit the sapiens and
then get obviously the Middle East would be a pretty
logical next place to go from Africa, and they happened
(13:28):
upon the Neanderthal and they're like wow, we wow, who
are you? And then they were all of a sudden
sharing space together, right, starting about a hundred thousand years
ago in the Middle East. In the Middle East and
then in Europe, they shared space for two hundred to
five hundred generations. Yeah, they just like the Neanderthals spread out.
(13:49):
The sapiens basically followed the same path. But they were
already people there. It was Neanderthals and um, yeah, two
hundred generations, five hundred generations between fourth isn't in ten
thousand years a very long time to share space. It
really is like that many generations that that of just
living in the same place. The thing is is over
(14:11):
the lifespan of the Neanderthals, fifty thousand years, four thousand
years is nothing. It's the blink of an eye. And
around the time about so say, humans or sapiens showed
up in Europe about forty two thousand years ago, about
forty thousand years ago something give or take a few
thousand years Neanderthals just vanished. Did they melt? We don't
(14:37):
remember that old theory. That's right, they've melted like nine
years ago. That was great. Good, So I think that's
a good place for a break. Yeah, we'll talk about
what happened right after this. Well, now we're on the road,
driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or
two from Josh Chuck stuff you should know? All right?
(15:13):
All right? So, uh appearance of of sapiens in Europe
before this um disappearance of Neanderthals. For a very long time,
everyone basically just had one of two theories, either that
sapiens killed them off, or that they were just so
smart that they out competed them for resources and they
(15:35):
went away. And that was It's known as the replacement
model or the recent African origin model, and people were
all on that train. If some people still very much
are really oh yeah, in academia, not just not just
you know, general public, I say boo to that. I agree,
And it seems like there are people who are kind
of chipping away at that. But I believe the replacement
(15:56):
model is the dominant model for what happened to the Neanderthals.
It basically as humans, Homo sapiens came along and our
brains are so much smarter. We were capable of things
that Neanderthals couldn't even dream of. Um, things like culture
and art and all sorts of nication, right, um language
probably um that the Neanderthals just didn't stand a chance.
(16:17):
Once the sapience showed up, it was like progresses here,
go ahead and die and either directly by killing them
via warfare or like you said, just out competing them.
That was it for the Neanderthals. And the timing is
definitely well suspect, you know, like, and I think that's
what a lot of people have clamped onto is humans
show up a couple of thousand years, Neanderthals are gone. Yeah,
(16:39):
it makes sense, um on the surface. But in two
thousand ten there was some pretty startling discovery. Um, they
fully sequenced Neanderthal genome, which is amazing, super amazing, and
we found out wait a minute, us sapiens, some of
us have Neanderthal DNA in our bodies. Are Neanderthals ourselves?
(17:03):
Yeah about depending on where you're from in your ethnic background,
but if you're European or Asian, you have pretty good
likelihood of being wondered four percent in Neanderthal as far
as your DNA goes um. In Sub Saharan Africa, there's
not any obviously, because that's where the Sapiens were all, uh,
you know, hanging out and doing their thing right. They
hadn't migrated out and intermixed with the with the Neanderthals,
(17:26):
So you know what that means. That means that time
period where they were all sharing space, they're also sharing space.
There was like a lot of you know what I'm saying,
they were making love. Oh that yeah, took Took would
make love and create little baby Tooktooks. We have to
say for just to keep it crownded. We're not exactly
(17:46):
sure what kind of uh circumstances that making love took. No,
you're right, it could have been mistaken identity um. And
obviously the brutal scenario, which is probably the most likely,
is that they came in by force and that was
like raping and pillaging going up. But the thing is,
we don't know that that's necessarily likely. You know, I
(18:06):
don't know. We honestly have such a little understandings for Neanderthal.
We have no idea they might have been hippies, but
we got to throw that out there, uh as one
of the obvious possibilities. Yeah, as much as you want
to just be like, oh, that's so awesome, the Neanderthals
were there, the humans showed up, and rather than humans
killing off Neanderthals saying get out of here, you old
(18:27):
archaic humans, they said, let's get it on. Well, not
only let's get on, let's let's let's share resources, let's
teach each other things. Yeah, let's explore life together and
let's try. Didn't go away. They just got absorbed. And
because there were far more sapiens, uh, their traits just
(18:47):
you know, sort of got weeded out over the years
for the most part. So this is the rival to
that replacement model that's the dominant model. This is called
the multi regional evolution model. And it says basic me
what you just said, that Neanderthals and humans did it
so much that the hybrid human Neanderthals that were um
(19:08):
that were born as offspring um, they they mated with
other Neanderthals or other humans. But because there were more
sapiens I'm sorry, more sapiens than there were Neanderthals, the
likelihood was that a hybrid would be much more likely
to mate with a sapient and then that hybrid would
be even more watered down neanderthal And then over time
(19:31):
because of exactly and Neanderthals didn't die off, they didn't
get chased out, they just became part of that larger
human genome. So there's another theory too that's interesting, or
another interpretation. I guess it's not a theory. And this
has to do with climate change. Um. They did a
(19:51):
study into and well this year actually two thousand nineteen
in France, and they discovered that all you need over
the course of about ten thousand years is about a
two point seven decrease in fertility rates UM to go
bye by ten tho years for a decrease in UM
first time young neandertal mothers that population, and they said
(20:16):
cut that in half basically are close to it. Within
four thousand years, you would need only an eight percent
decrease in fertility and that same group. So it's very Uh,
it makes a lot of sense that with a little
bit of climate change and a little bit of scarcity
and just uh, it didn't have to be anything drastic,
but over that amount of time, if you don't have
(20:39):
any as many calories going into your body in your
first time under twenty year old, uh Neanderthal mother, you're
not going to be successful and you're not gonna be
as fertile. And then over time that just means you
kind of very quietly and slowly go away. Yeah, I
got this. I think I found this article from Live Science,
and in it they say, by the way, um, if
the human replace meant rate dropped to one point three
(21:02):
babies per mother, we'd be gone in three hundred years.
So so just a very slight drop among the neandertals
could have accounted for that four thousand to ten thousand
year process of just suddenly disappearing. And again in this
this interpretation, humans didn't do anything. We didn't war with them,
we didn't outcompete them, we didn't do anything. It was
(21:25):
just something happened to the environment and it was just
harder to be fertile. And it wasn't all at once.
Maybe it might have been staggered in different parts of
the world exactly over over four thousand to ten thousand years.
And the reason it wasn't that Neanderthals couldn't compete, that
they couldn't survive um whereas humans could. Because Neanderthals, again,
(21:46):
their lifespan was three hundred fifty thousand years. Modern humans
have only been around for fifty to a hundred thousand years,
maybe two hundred at the outside. So Neanderthals had been
around for a very long time, had been very good
at adapting to a changing climate basically the whole time
that they were around. So it's not like they couldn't
compete or couldn't adapt and humans could. What they think
(22:07):
is that they were just way more humans, and so
our numbers probably dropped at the same rate that Neanderthal
numbers did. There was just more of us to survive
and carry on after things got better. Yeah, and in
more varied ranges in parts of the world too. That
all kind of makes sense to me. I suppose it
could be uh, both of those, climate change and lovemaking
(22:31):
right right, very easily. Yeah, they definitely go hand in hand.
Like er, should we take another break? All right, We'll
take another break and talk about what we now the
sort of current understanding of the picture of what the
Neanderthal was. Right after this, Well, now we're on the
road driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing
(22:51):
or two from Josh can chuck stuff. You should know,
all right. Mh. By the way, have you seen or
(23:12):
heard of that movie William? Uh? It was out in April,
did not do well, was not reviewed well. But it
is basically a sort of mad scientist. Not a mad scientist,
but a scientist with a mad idea. Uh. There's a
(23:33):
human Neanderthal born. They get the d n A impregnate
a modern sapient woman and she has a a Neanderthal boy, William,
and he goes to high school. I did not see that.
I had no idea about that movie. Yeah, just check
out the trailer. Oh, I don't haven't seen it. It's
not supposed to be very good, and it did not
(23:53):
look very good. But it was very much like, you know,
I just want to fit in, and he's you know,
he's he's in the andertal. He's got the regular haircut,
in the vans and the jeans and the T shirt.
He's got the big forehead and the thick man. It
does it does, and it looks like it could be
a joke, but it's real. Was there that I feel
(24:16):
good in the middle of the trailer suddenly or that
scene where like like a teen wolf or something where
he's really good at sports or something. Yeah, Man William, Yeah,
there's a weekend for you right there. Much. I'm not
gonna watch it, but I just thought it would be
it'd be worth mentioning before the emails come in. So, uh,
(24:39):
the image we're on a quest. I think UM and
sciences on a quest to sort of rehabilitate that's when
you mentioned that. But to rehabilitate the image of the
Neanderthal is this hunched over brute. Part of the problem is, uh,
they sort of based in an entire EC's on this
(25:01):
one hunched over uh dude, skeleton skeleton, and they're like,
look at them that they're all hunched over oaths shambling
And now they're like, oh, actually that individual may have
had a degenerative bone disease. And what we now think
is they just walked around like we do and probably
looked a lot like we do. Um. They think that
(25:22):
from like sequencing the Neanderthal genome, they think that at
least some of them had red hair and light colored skin, which,
by the way, by interbreeding UM with Neanderthals recent arrivals
from Africa, their hybrid offspring would have been conferred with UM, thicker,
(25:42):
straighter hair, a smaller compact frame, all sorts of stuff
that you would need UM in this colder climate of
eur Asia from having just come up from Africa over
the last few generations. So there was good stuff, there
was also bad. So they think some of the disease
that we suffer from h is is actually related to
Neanderthal DNA that doesn't have a context or a point
(26:06):
or a function like it used to, and that that
now it's actually producing disease in us. Yeah, like the
same d NA, Like they could have had the same
things that we associate with diabetes and crones, but they
would have didn't affect them like it does us because
lifestyle and everything that how we diverged precisely really interesting.
I think there's actually that's the alternative explanation for the
(26:29):
hygiene hypothesis. I did these these both sort of linked
in some ways right there. So behaviorally, it's, uh, we're
again we're trying to get away from this idea of
caveman uh and things that we thought were strictly sapient.
Over the years, it turns out that Neanderthals were actually
(26:49):
good at like making tools. Uh, and this really interesting technique, uh,
the Leva leva loire technique, which is basically, I am
in the area where I have the resources to make
all the tools, but we got to pack up and leave,
and we don't know if we're going to have this
stuff there. Yeah, there's some dinosaurs after us. Yeah. So
(27:10):
like the very like raw resource, like let's say it's
just a certain type of stone. So we're gonna pre
shape all these things into it's sort of a rudimentary uh,
a rudimentary tool that we can later make into a
hammer or a chisel, like, depending on what we need.
But we're gonna kind of sort of pre shape them here,
pack them up, and take them all with us, so
we'll have this little factory that we can set up
(27:32):
anywhere we want, depending what we need. That's smart it is,
and it's a technological innovation that is definitely attributed to
the Neanderthals, like they came up with. It's awesome. Um
and tool making, Like we knew that older archaic humans
were good with tools, going back probably a million or
so years. Chimps use tools, they use termmite sticks. So
(27:53):
people are saying like great, like the Neanderthals like created
some sort of like new technology, some new tool called sure. Um,
who cares. It still doesn't make them smart. But there's
other stuff we found out about Neanderthals that we started
that have really kind of changed our view of them
because they're doing things or they we found out they're
capable of things that that they are supposed to Those
(28:15):
are the things that make humans humans like Neanderthals aren't
supposed to have been doing this. But the more evidence
we're getting, the with the fresher eyes were looking at
existing evidence, it's starting to look like they were behaviorally
modern like humans, or there's a really good chance that
they were Yeah like the sapes. Uh, they could they
could spark fire, So the old notion like quest for fire,
(28:37):
that they just had to sit around and wait for
lightning to strike a bush is not true. They use
that fire to cook food, they think, they think, which
is a big deal. It's open to interpretation stuff. Um.
What else they know from studying the injuries on the
animals that they hunted, that they were very intelligent hunters
and they killed big, big animals at close range, which
(29:00):
meant that they were skilled, that they understood risk that
they were brave and that they will get into communication more.
But you've got to be communicating to to do something
like that. Yeah, because they would hunt in packs, but
they would do it in close range. And I was
at the Velociraptor. Oh I think so Jurassic Park. Uh
the uh while they threw me off? Sorry, do you
(29:23):
think I'd be expecting in this episode? Though? You know
it wasn't they do hunting packs? Though? It was. I
was just appropriating that line. But what was it? Oh man,
they do travel in they do pack lightly, Yeah, that
was it? Okay? So Um, the fact that these guys
would take on reindeer and bison and mammoths at close
(29:46):
range with like spears and javelins and like, you know,
some some hand to hand combat type stuff has really
kind of undermined that that replacement model idea that humans
came in and just killed off all the Neanderthals, right
because they just stood no chance. They right, Neanderthals were tough,
tough mos. Yes, most um one of the big ones here.
(30:11):
And this is where it gets super interesting, I think
to me is the use of symbols. That is something
that we thought was very much sapien very sapey, right,
if if they can, if they we can show that
Neanderthals understood symbols and had that kind of higher thought
that would make them behaviorally equivalent to humans. Yeah, and
(30:34):
we're talking like anything sen Yeah, the sapes. We're talking
anything from making a like a necklace out of beads
to wear like an adornments, to using like pigments on
the face like the precursor to make up and stuff
like that. And humans have been shown to UM to
have been doing that at least for the last eighty
thousand years SAPs. And I don't know why I can't
(30:56):
get that UM sapes have been doing that is the
earliest evidences at two sites in Ethiopia. And this is
they think it was like for you know, identity or
jewelry or something like that, but it is like that's
not something you just do like this is there's a
there's not necessarily a practical function to it, and it's
(31:18):
a form of art. And there's ambiguous evidence that Neanderthals
did this too, that there was body adornment, that there
was that they would color themselves and pigments put on
makeup basically, right, So here's the thing question. So that
would suggest that Okay, if Neanderthals do that and humans
(31:38):
did that too, then that makes Neanderthals equivalent to humans behaviorally.
But the people who are big time into the replacement
model that the Neandertals were actually kind of stupid and
humans are the pinnacle and the first example of higher intelligence. UM.
They say, well, if you really kind of date some
of this stuff that the Neanderthals may, it's probably around
(32:01):
the time that humans showed up. And it's really just
Neanderthals copying what they saw humans doing. But there's no
symbol symbolism to it in that like they could copy
a shell as an ornament, but there they didn't have
any meaning. Yeah, which is a really sort of a
snotty approach, I think so too. Well, they might have
done it, but they were just copying, no copying. Remember
(32:26):
that kid, you know the kids doing now he or
she is running the company? Is that Dennis Snoven ice
cream man manager, ice cream factory manager. So, uh, cave art.
Let's talk about cave art because this is this is
the one thing that UM to make art is the
(32:48):
one thing that traditionally have always separated sapes from everyone else, right, Like,
if everybody's saying, okay, even if Neanderthals came up with
body adornments, that's not art, we're gonna raise the bar, right,
this is what the poo poers say, that doesn't really
qualify as art. Cave art is where it's at. If
(33:09):
you could show me Neanderthals that created cave art, I
will agree that they are behaviorally equivalent to modern humans
of their era. Yeah, and they found cave art modern
sas man. They found cave art at the same time
that there were Neanderthals around caves. But um, again, there
was just like, oh, well that was the sapes, right,
(33:30):
That wasn't the Neanderthals doing that? Right? They think that
the sapiens came in and made that cave art, right, Like,
we need an ambiguous proof at this point. Here's the problem.
Radio carbon dating gets unreliable after forty years, and it
requires organic material to date these pigments. They're using mineral pigments,
not organic ones, so that was a problem. But and
(33:53):
this is kind of mind blowing. In two thousand eighteen,
they discovered or I guess perfected a dating technique that
measures the rate of decay of uranium atoms and calcite deposits.
So that's what makes up stalactites and stalagmites in limestone case. Yeah.
So the idea is if you find cave art's sort
of like the mosquito called an amber, it's a time stamp.
(34:15):
If you find cave art that's underneath uh some of
this deposits that have dripped down over it and encased it,
you can date that. Then you know how old that
cave art is. Yeah, because the cave arts under the calsite,
you know how old the ca the cal site is,
then the cave art has to be at least as
old or slightly older than the earliest deposit of calcite.
What's what's the big secret? Well, there was sped There
(34:37):
was a study in two thousand and eighteen that found
that some cave art in in a cave in Spain
was created sixty four thousand years ago, a full twenty
thousand plus years before Homo sapiens showed up in the area,
which means that it had to have been Neanderthals that
created this cave art. Do you know what the Brewers said?
(34:59):
What that's not really art? What swear to god, are
you serious? He's like some hand stencils and some dots
on the wall. That doesn't count. That's the first art,
yea tracing their hand to make a turkey. They are
really holding on for dear life. But it's it's some
people are really swimming against this current, like they do
not want the idea that humans are not uniquely um
(35:22):
uh special. I guess in that sense that people have
been thinking that it was humans and Homo sapiens that
have the ability to create art and think symbolically. Um.
And it's starting to look like that's not the case.
Not only that that not it's not just humans, and
that maybe Neanderstals did too, But that's possible that this
(35:43):
kind of stuff evolved even further back, and that Heidelberg
INSTIs are less common ancestor running around seven thousand years
ago may have created art and may have been doing
all this other stuff too that makes us uniquely human. Well. Um.
Another one is music. They have found bones from cave
bears in Southeast Europe that had these holes and they're like, hey,
(36:07):
looks like a flute to me, And he's like a flute.
It sounds like a flute. Um. So it's Jethro Tull. Uh.
That's so. I'm so glad that they added flute to
their outfit. Not many groups Marshall Tucker band had the flute.
And here's a little something for you. I mean I
(36:27):
told the story, but I was in our little local
market getting some food about two years ago, remember that,
and there was a guy in a band, clearly and
he was like a play flute for Marshall Tucker. It's like,
are you kidding? No, I'm not sorry, Like you're one
of the two most famous flutists in rock music. But
it wasn't. The original guy I found out still plays
(36:48):
flute from Marshall Tuck agreed. Just because he didn't write
those flute parts doesn't make him any less of a flutist.
He could still play. Yeah. So uh, anyway, they the
naysayer with the flute or just like, oh no, man,
those are just they were bones chomped on by hyena teeth. Yeah,
the the flute holes, the finger holes are teeth teeth marks. Yeah,
(37:11):
and sure you can play aqualong on it, but that's
just because the hyenas in their teeth marks. Right. Um,
there's a there's also really good evidence, cumulative evidence. There's
one other thing about the cave art that we didn't say, sculpture.
Uh well, that was one thing that they found what
looks to be stalactite, like purposeful arrangements of stalactites in
(37:35):
a cave. That's from a hundred and seventy six thou right, Um,
But no, there are other similar cave art paintings in
Spanish caves um are in different places. So they think
it was an actual part of Neandertal culture. There wasn't
one particularly imaginative Neanderthal who happened to leave it behind. Yes,
(37:56):
and it even said this is art love tuk tuk right,
find me on insta at took took oh if only? Um? So.
The the other thing that there's a lot of a
mass evidence for is that Neanderthals appeared to have buried
(38:17):
they're dead. This is pretty cool. This is enormous because Okay,
not only can they think symbolically and like art and
creating representations of things that may or may not exist,
they can they're thinking about something coming after this. You
don't just bury a corpse for many reasons other than
(38:37):
um spiritual reasons. I mean, you can to keep like
you know, the wolves away because you're going to camp
near the corpse. But if you're a hunter gather, you
just move camp and you can leave the person laying
out there in the bush by for the wolves to take.
It doesn't matter because there's no afterlife. If you bury somebody,
it indicates you're thinking about something beyond this life, and
(38:58):
that is definitely higher level thing. King. Yeah, and when
we say Barry, we don't mean they just found this
body like on the floor of a deep cave, like
they dug a hole and placed a body in their
positioned them in a specific way they found Yeah, different
like grave sites basically like cemeteries of bodies buried in
the same manner. And they even found in Northern Iraq
(39:20):
pollen flower pollen, which clearly suggests that they buried them
with flowers. They definitely seems to that's like, that's a funerary, right,
unless it was just an accident and they just dropped
a bunch of flowers on the way up, which I mean,
it's possible, but it seems unlikely. I don't know if
I'm being naive, but I really want to believe this. Yeah, well,
(39:40):
it's nice, it's refreshing to think about. You know, humans
don't have to have for sapiens don't have to have
the market corner. We can share the humanity. Yeah, here's
another one. Um, if they were just brutes who you know,
who didn't have any capacity to understand things take care
of one another. They found individuals and one in particular
(40:05):
that was deaf, likely visually impaired because of a blow
to the head from as a ute, probably from a sapien,
maybe was missing his right hand, and then suffered a
disease that reduced his mobility. And they found this person
lived into his forties, maybe up to fifty. Yeah, which
(40:25):
there's no way this person would have survived without a
community of people taking care of and making sure that
this person survived and ate and got around and moved
along with them. Yeah, because they cared for one another
and tried to heal one another. Right, Yeah, they took
care of their sick. They're injured, they're they're disabled, they're ill.
Um they like, they took they shared resources with them.
(40:47):
People who couldn't necessarily contribute still got stuff from the
from the community, which suggests this as tight knit social
group that cared for one another. And then what about language?
So this one just knocked my socks off. There are
these Dutch researchers who wrote a paper that argued that, um,
(41:07):
Neanderthals almost certainly spoke a nuanced language that we would
recognize as a modern language. UM. And that not only
did Neanderthals speak this speak their own language, probably Heidelbergensis
and maybe even further back in our archaic family line
spoke language too, And that if that's true. If that's
(41:30):
the case, Neanderthals had their own language, and human humans
absorbed Neanderthal's both culturally and genetically, it's entirely possible that
there are traces of Neanderthal language that still appear in
our languages that are spoken around the world today unbeknownst
to us. Man, if they could find out those words,
isn't that amazing? Yeah, it's pretty cool. I love that.
(41:54):
I like all this. I love you Neanderthals, love you
Sapien Tuck and uh, I think I used to just
throw tuk Took around in various ways, but then you
developed a taste for watching him make luck. That's right.
But let me just from this point forward, took Took
is clearly uh deep No, clearly Neanderthal. Oh I think
(42:17):
I kind of just threw Took Took's name around as
any kind of early man. Yeah, he could have been
Captain Caveman. He could have been the Geigo Caveman. But
he could be William for all I know. You know,
I thought about I thought about it. The so Tuk
Took is officially Neanderthal, yes, okay, Um, the Geico Caveman
is actually a really good for the struggle between the
(42:41):
interpretation of Neanderthals today, Like everybody's like it's so easy
a caveman could do it, and this guy is playing
like squash and driving a Porsche. Yeah. Do you remember
that there their short lived TV show. I remember that
it existed, but I never saw it. They drove one
of them drove a Porsche. Yeah, and now a word
from Geico. Uh okay. Well, if you want to know
(43:02):
more about Neanderthals, start reading up about it. And there's
a pretty amazing exhibit funded by one of the Koke
brothers if I'm not mistaken, at the Smithsonian where you
can see a real live Neanderthal skeleton. Really pretty beautiful. Um,
what's their angle right something? Maybe maybe they're trying to
rehabilitate neandertals for some reason to bring him back his
(43:25):
exploited workers. And since I just said something about the
Koke Brothers, time for go ahead administrative. Okay, Chuck, as
I said, it's time for administrative. Is this like a
(43:52):
family guy where you're just gonna do that? All right,
We're gonna start this one off. This is when we
thank listeners for sending in kindness is to us and
Michelle from Crown Royal. Oh, yes, once again the booze
company that just keeps giving I know, they just keep
us in booze. Thanks a lot for that. And I
just wrote down more booze. But we'll go ahead and
(44:15):
plug the Crown Royal rye. What about those, um, those
glasses they gave us, so they're like these the rocks
classes tumblers. Um, got a good hef to them, nice shape,
size bottom and then yeah in that thick bottom th
h I C C bottom. Um, there is a laser
etched CROWMB Royal three D logo which is like so classy.
(44:38):
Your pinky can't touch the glasses physically impossible. Yeah, it
just sticks straight up in the air when you're drinking
out of these glass Oh, A lot of research went
into that design, you know, to make sure that pinky
was nowhere near the box. Um. Aaron Clark, Speaking of pinkies,
Aaron Clark sent us a Twinkie the kids statue. Thanks Aaron,
(44:59):
that's right. Um. Monica and kam A in Fukushima, Japan
said it's a nice, very nice handwritten letter and some
fuku stuff pin stickers, calendars, magazine where uh it's I
got at the desk. I didn't share that with you
and they said, uh, things are much better now good.
(45:20):
That's cryptic, but yes, I'm glad. Um so we haven't
done this in a little while. I want to say
thank you very much for the Christmas cards from Heather
k and Sri Lanka and one from Renee and Eric Chester.
It's very kind of you, guys. Here's one maybe the
weirdest thing we've ever gotten, but one of the most awesome.
(45:41):
Scott Borderlan remember our Wendy's Chili Finger episode. He sent
us Wendy's Chili from that Wendy's Wow, I think you're
out of town. Yeah, it obviously was no good by
the time it got to me even and he was like,
I know, this is not I'm not expecting you to eat.
This would eat. But he taped it up and he
(46:01):
was like, this is chili from that very Wendy's. That's amazing.
He just thought it would be kind of fun. You
may be right, that may be the weirdest thing Withishiyah,
but not even freeze dried. And then there's Brooke Bergen.
Send a T shirt and stickers of his work and
you can check out its very very awesome work. I
believe his it could be a girl um and you
(46:24):
can check out they're awesome work at Brooks Bergen b
r O O K S b U r G A
and dot com. That's right. That raises a point. If
you want to send us the pronoun you identify with,
we are more than happy to abide by that. Claire
Sanchez and his skincakes, Oh yeah, very simple, delicious. Teresa
(46:47):
sent us really awesome quilted hand quilted postcards. That's yeah, beautiful. Again,
we haven't done this in a while. Sorry for everybody
who's been sitting around waiting having to listen to every
episode just on the off chance that administrative details is on.
So everyone, Jerry just stopped us right in the middle
and said I have one. We always go on and
(47:08):
on about Jerry and her miso. Uh, big ups to
Adam Brenton in Japan sent Jerry so miso, how about
that way to go, Adam. Jerry got her own gift
after eleven years, after all this time, our very own
gift and meaning we didn't also get me so and
we even asked him she's hoarding it? Yeah, because we
(47:29):
share with Jerry. She didn't didn't go both ways. We
tried to. Yeah. Uh, so let's see Joanna send us
delicious beer chocolates. Remember those? Um she brought him to
our Portland's show I believe, Yeah, yeah, and they were awesome.
So thanks a lot, Tina, you don't remember him because
they were beer chocolates. Tammy and Justin send us miniature
(47:50):
clay figures handpainted, which is very very sweet, along with
a very nice letter. We got a postcard from Vienna,
probably not Voyanna Georgia. I think it was v Austria,
like the real one from Pauline. Thanks a lot, Pauline,
Michelle and Nevin of Smithtown, New York. Sin us wedding
imitation um, happy marriage, guys, mozl tov uh and then
(48:12):
we gotta thank you note from Mitch m I C H.
But it rhymes with rich, So thank you for the
thank you note. Mitch Lowell Hutchinson sent us some uh oh,
these are wonderful. There some hand lathed pins. Remember Lowells
the one who sponsored are She's one of our elephant sponsors. Yeah, yeah,
hand painted wood lathed pins. Yeah, man, very very beautiful.
(48:35):
And on that note, we actually got a lot of pins,
and I don't think I wrote all of them down
because we did our episode on pens and people felt
compelled to send us their favorite pen and spread the
pen love. So if we forgot your pen, big apologies.
Yeah for real, that was very nice. And by the way,
also again um, you can check out Lowell's turned wood
(48:57):
creations and by the way, she donates of all sales
to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust too, So go to
at c dot com slash shop slash l O W
E L L h U T C H D E
S I G N S wonderful Joe gather Coles and
his T shirts and c d s from his horror
punk band Headstone Horrors. It's a great name. Yeah. Uh
(49:21):
And then let's see I've only got I got three more. Okay,
I've got a book from Nick Kemper. Thanks a lot
for the book. Nick. That is beautiful of you. Mike
n s. And it's a box of coffee crisps and
they are delicious and they are long gone. Yeah, I
can attest they are very yummy. Thanks Mike. And then uh,
we got a an amazing illustration of us with a
(49:41):
peacock by Cali. Thanks for that. It's a great one.
All right. I got two more um adam Resus and
s Megalodon teeth. Yes for pretty awesome. Yeah, they are
in large as you would expect. You got another one.
I'm done, all right, my last one. Then, Kathy Hutton
send us some dog collars. She works for a nonprofit
(50:03):
spay and neuter clinic in Washington State. Curly Tailed Hawk
is who makes these collars, and they donate a dollar
from every collar that you can just go to Curly
Tailed Hawk dot com and get your dog a new
collar already, and some of that money will go to
the spay and neuter clinic, which is great. There you go, Well,
thank you everybody. If you want to get in touch
(50:25):
with us, you don't have to send us anything. You
can just say hi. Go on to our social networks
and you can find all the links at stuff you
Should Know dot com. You can also send us an
email to stuff podcast at i heart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi friends, this is Josh and for this week's Select
I chose our episode on Neanderthals mayhaps the most misunderstood
hominin of all time. We long tended to think of
Neanderthals as loping dummies, but recent research questions that view,
and Chuck and I swoop in to defend them with
all our might leave the Neanderthals alone. Welcome to Stuff
(00:28):
You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and um,
this is stuff you should know, Stuff you should Nizzo.
(00:49):
I'm excited about this one. This just feels like classic
Josh and Chuck. I think so too. Took Took's gonna
make an appearance. Took Took, Mike make sweet of Hm,
which is always fun. And yeah, we like to watch
He's surprisingly tender, he is. I'm sorry. All the third
(01:12):
graders are actually, more to the point, the third grade
teachers who are standing there right now at the head
of class, They're like, oh, what happened to the Neanderthals?
Perfect for the classroom, right, So yeah, this is very Uh,
I thought this is very cool. I love this. But
we talked a little bit about Neanderthals in the past
and Homo sapiens and uh, Dennis Snovin's and that's right, right,
(01:34):
there's an extra in in there. I think Dennis Stovan's
Dennis Snoven sounds like a dude, like he manages ice
cream factory, right, Snovin, Dennis Snovin. Uh, this is good
stuff though, So let's let's treat everyone so all right,
we'll do our best. Put the pressure on. So neander
(01:55):
Neanderthals it really so? Then correct pronunciation is tall by
the way, Yeah, I had a teacher point that out,
remember very specifically in the in the ninth grade. Right,
but when you're being correct, you're actually speaking in Old German,
not even modern German. So it's really just a question
(02:16):
of how you want to say it. Either one's acceptable, no,
I mean the pronunciation would still be that in modern
German neander Tal Yeah, okay, because I saw it spelled
t a L two. Oh really yeah, let's get it
to that, h okay. I kind of like it. I
like how it looks, but I think it's up to
the individuals say taller thal. Okay, but the correct way
(02:36):
is neander tal, right, okay, and neander talls. I'm probably
gonna just switch back and forth. That's okay with everybody.
That is our way. Not to make a big deal
out of it or anything, but um, neander talls, uh
or thals, depending on who you are. They were a
species of human, beings of humans. Like, if you think
(03:00):
about it, chuck you, jerry me, everybody out there sometimes
nol Yeah, same species, one species of human. That's it.
Like you just don't really kind of think about that.
But if you dialed back a little bit, if we
got on the way back machine and went back just
like forty thousand years, there'll be at least one other
(03:22):
species of human running around on Earth. They would be
the Neanderthals. So we didn't even know that there was
another such thing as another human species until the eighteen
fifties because there was a forty year gap separating us
and then that's right, So the very first fossils of
a Neanderthal was found in eighteen twenty nine in Belgium
(03:43):
and then again in Gibraltar in eight But that kind
of were just like, oh cool, look at these old bones.
Wasn't a big deal. Wat's how easy they snapped on
my knee, right, they didn't know what they were. No.
And then in nineteen fifty six in Germany something pretty
significant happened. Uh. They found some pretty substantial fossils. I
think a whole skeleton. Actually, yeah, well they definitely found
(04:05):
a whole skull. Um. This was in four or five
ft of clay at in a limestone quarry cave in
a site called felt so Glad. And this is in
the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf. And this is where it
all comes around. If you hear the word Neanderthal or
at all um t h a l and Old German
(04:27):
means valley. And so the scientific name Homo neander tollensus
means humans from the Neander Valley. Yes, because that's where
the first one that we realized, Um, wait a minute,
this is This isn't a cave bear, this isn't like
some some dead person. This is a different species of human. Yeah.
(04:48):
They saw that the what we now know is classic
Neanderthal oval shape, that that big thick, low receding forehead
and brow very thick owns this. Uh, that was brought
to the query foreman, and he said it's a cave bear.
I guess he came over from Alabama. But he said,
(05:10):
but I do know a teacher and a guy who's
really into fossils. His name is Johann Karl full Wrought,
and here you can have these bones. He got them,
did some impressions. He went, what uh, did some castings
of these and sent those two Hermann uh Schaffhausen, a professor.
I don't know why German is so funny to you.
(05:32):
I don't either, but coming out of your mouth, it's
like it's just hilarious. After all these years. He's a professor,
was a professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn.
And they both were like, hey, this is significant because
this ain't no human uh, no Homo sapien. But it's
a human, right, we think, right, it's some other kind
of human, some other kind of hominid that we just
(05:56):
didn't understand before. So they presented their findings in the world.
He said like this, everybody get a load of this.
And there was an immediate problem with Neanderthals there there's
so this is eighteen fifties, eighteen fifty seven when they
prevented presented their fightings. And that was before on the
origin of the species. So before Darwin, it was like
(06:18):
God created all this, God created you, God created the panther,
God created the monkeys separately, like all this stuff was
all separate. And then Darwin came along and said, no,
all this stuff is actually related, and if you trace
everything far enough back, you're gonna find a last common
ancestor between two things that don't look anything alike, um,
including humans and apes. And so this was before that,
(06:43):
so it didn't fit into the Christian creation story. But
then even after Darwin came along, it just so happened
that Neanderthals were discovered and analyzed and and it was
realized that they were in different species of human at
a time when biological anthropology was around. Yeah, for oology
and the you know, we've talked about it on the
show a little bit, the very sort of racist practice
(07:05):
of um categorizing humans and their inferiority of races by
the shapes of their skull. Right, look at this skull. Um,
well there it's not not basically Western and European shaped.
We think it has some weird ridge. Um, so they're
an inferior race. They extended all that onto Neanderthals because
(07:29):
if you think, you know, if you're if you're comparing
like human Homo sapiens skulls to one another and somehow
finding inferiority or superiority in that in the shapes of
those When you compare a Neanderthal skull to a human skull,
clearly that human skull is much more refined and developed.
Neanderthals must have been these dim witted brutes the caveman. Like.
(07:51):
The whole reason we think of the caveman and Neanderthals
is big dummies and and oaths. It is because they
were discovered during a time of racist science. Yeah, and
that was the view that was held, and it's still
held by some people who don't know better. This is
why we're doing that, you know, one reason why we're
doing this episode. But it was held for a couple
(08:12):
of hundred years. But in the recent decades things have changed.
Our picture of the Neanderthal has changed because of science
and research, and we now know that, uh, well, a
lot of cool things. I don't want to spoil it yet, Okay, Yeah,
I was wondering if that was too much of the
beans getting out. I think so let's tease that out.
(08:34):
That's fine with Uh, we'll just sit here quietly for
a second as we go past this. Okay, all right,
we ready, yeah, alright. So the current story, like the
simple version of the current story, is the Neanderthal and
the I mean, should we just say the modern human
or that's how I was like, wow, because they're both humans. Yeah,
(08:56):
but they're just two different species of human sapience neandertal
and sapience. All right, So they separated between a half
a million and about six dred and fifty thousand years ago,
and they both diverge from a common branch um H.
Heidel bir Genesis virgensis. I think the g is hard.
I'm pretty sure that's right. H. Heidelbergensis. Yeah, all right,
(09:19):
that sounds right. Yeah, And this was in Africa, right,
that's where the divergence happened. That's right. Um. Then, so
either the division the divergence happened in Africa or some
Heidelbergensis state in Africa, and some spread out of Africa, yeah,
into the Old World in Asia, and over time, because
(09:43):
of the separation, these groups of humans started branching out
and developing into distinct species. One of the species. The
first one to develop into a distinct species from this
branch was Neanderthals, and by at least four hundred thousand
years ago, there were Neanderthals running around like distinct species
(10:07):
of humans called Neanderthals. Yeah, and they were developing independently
because they were very far from each other and they
didn't for a very long time, did not have very much,
if any, contact with one another. Yeah. Remember we did
an episode on speciation where like brown bears and polar
bears used to be the same bear, but the polar
bears started drifting further and further north, and they're actually
(10:29):
adapted to a different climate, different habitat, so much so
that they became a different species. That's the exact same
thing that we're talking about. Heidelberg ansis drifted into two
different parts of Africa and Europe, and the climate and
the habitat was different enough that it split into two
different species. Yeah. So what you've got in Eurasia is
(10:50):
a range from like Portugal and Wales in the west
over to like Siberia. This is for Neanderthals, right, yeah,
in the east. So that was their range in general,
and all the way down to the Middle East. Yeah,
it was a huge range, very big range. Um, the biggest. Uh.
They were shorter than sapiens that we're still in Africa.
(11:13):
They were kind of stockier, They had bigger brains. They
were by most accounts, stronger, more muscular, had wider hips
and shoulders, sturdier bones, very sturdy, just stocky, robust thing.
You would not want to mess with the Neanderthal. No,
and they were very adaptable. They they lived in very
cold environments. Uh, they lived in very sort of warm,
(11:34):
temperate environments. So it depends on the time. This is
what they think. They think that that range that was
so huge for the Neanderthals, there wasn't necessarily Neanderthals living
in all parts of that range at the same time
for four hundred thousand years or three fifty thousand years.
They think that over time, some Neanderthal populations died and
(11:56):
others came along and replaced them, and then some of
them moved down here and some of them were over here.
That they may have lived in different parts of the
world at the same time, but not necessarily their entire
range all at once for the whole three fifty thousand years.
They moved a lot, and nor did they move all
together as whole populations. There's a lot of local extinctions
(12:19):
and recolonizations going on right exactly. So it's almost like
if you could look at the map of eur Asia
on a time lapse over three fifty thousand years that
Neanderthals were around in the area, you would just kind
of see these little populations kind of growing and popping
and dissolving and then picking up again. And these are
actually new groups going into areas, becoming like dying out
(12:43):
for one reason or another. And then a thousand or
ten thousand years later, there's another group that says, oh,
this is a great spot and showing up kind of
like our real Atlantis episode. Remember there's like like twelve
feet of like fifty different settlements over a thousands and
thousands of years, because they're just like, this is a
great place to settle, but each one had no idea
(13:04):
that the last one was there. Same thing with the
Neanderthal range. So the Neanderthals are doing their thing all
over eur Asia. Meanwhile back in Africa and East Africa,
you've got the Sapien doing their thing, and then they
start to radiate out a little bit the sapiens and
then get obviously the Middle East would be a pretty
logical next place to go from Africa, and they happened
(13:28):
upon the Neanderthal and they're like wow, we wow, who
are you? And then they were all of a sudden
sharing space together, right, starting about a hundred thousand years
ago in the Middle East. In the Middle East and
then in Europe, they shared space for two hundred to
five hundred generations. Yeah, they just like the Neanderthals spread out.
(13:49):
The sapiens basically followed the same path. But they were
already people there. It was Neanderthals and um, yeah, two
hundred generations, five hundred generations between fourth isn't in ten
thousand years a very long time to share space. It
really is like that many generations that that of just
living in the same place. The thing is is over
(14:11):
the lifespan of the Neanderthals, fifty thousand years, four thousand
years is nothing. It's the blink of an eye. And
around the time about so say, humans or sapiens showed
up in Europe about forty two thousand years ago, about
forty thousand years ago something give or take a few
thousand years Neanderthals just vanished. Did they melt? We don't
(14:37):
remember that old theory. That's right, they've melted like nine
years ago. That was great. Good, So I think that's
a good place for a break. Yeah, we'll talk about
what happened right after this. Well, now we're on the road,
driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or
two from Josh Chuck stuff you should know? All right?
(15:13):
All right? So, uh appearance of of sapiens in Europe
before this um disappearance of Neanderthals. For a very long time,
everyone basically just had one of two theories, either that
sapiens killed them off, or that they were just so
smart that they out competed them for resources and they
(15:35):
went away. And that was It's known as the replacement
model or the recent African origin model, and people were
all on that train. If some people still very much
are really oh yeah, in academia, not just not just
you know, general public, I say boo to that. I agree,
And it seems like there are people who are kind
of chipping away at that. But I believe the replacement
(15:56):
model is the dominant model for what happened to the Neanderthals.
It basically as humans, Homo sapiens came along and our
brains are so much smarter. We were capable of things
that Neanderthals couldn't even dream of. Um, things like culture
and art and all sorts of nication, right, um language
probably um that the Neanderthals just didn't stand a chance.
(16:17):
Once the sapience showed up, it was like progresses here,
go ahead and die and either directly by killing them
via warfare or like you said, just out competing them.
That was it for the Neanderthals. And the timing is
definitely well suspect, you know, like, and I think that's
what a lot of people have clamped onto is humans
show up a couple of thousand years, Neanderthals are gone. Yeah,
(16:39):
it makes sense, um on the surface. But in two
thousand ten there was some pretty startling discovery. Um, they
fully sequenced Neanderthal genome, which is amazing, super amazing, and
we found out wait a minute, us sapiens, some of
us have Neanderthal DNA in our bodies. Are Neanderthals ourselves?
(17:03):
Yeah about depending on where you're from in your ethnic background,
but if you're European or Asian, you have pretty good
likelihood of being wondered four percent in Neanderthal as far
as your DNA goes um. In Sub Saharan Africa, there's
not any obviously, because that's where the Sapiens were all, uh,
you know, hanging out and doing their thing right. They
hadn't migrated out and intermixed with the with the Neanderthals,
(17:26):
So you know what that means. That means that time
period where they were all sharing space, they're also sharing space.
There was like a lot of you know what I'm saying,
they were making love. Oh that yeah, took Took would
make love and create little baby Tooktooks. We have to
say for just to keep it crownded. We're not exactly
(17:46):
sure what kind of uh circumstances that making love took. No,
you're right, it could have been mistaken identity um. And
obviously the brutal scenario, which is probably the most likely,
is that they came in by force and that was
like raping and pillaging going up. But the thing is,
we don't know that that's necessarily likely. You know, I
(18:06):
don't know. We honestly have such a little understandings for Neanderthal.
We have no idea they might have been hippies, but
we got to throw that out there, uh as one
of the obvious possibilities. Yeah, as much as you want
to just be like, oh, that's so awesome, the Neanderthals
were there, the humans showed up, and rather than humans
killing off Neanderthals saying get out of here, you old
(18:27):
archaic humans, they said, let's get it on. Well, not
only let's get on, let's let's let's share resources, let's
teach each other things. Yeah, let's explore life together and
let's try. Didn't go away. They just got absorbed. And
because there were far more sapiens, uh, their traits just
(18:47):
you know, sort of got weeded out over the years
for the most part. So this is the rival to
that replacement model that's the dominant model. This is called
the multi regional evolution model. And it says basic me
what you just said, that Neanderthals and humans did it
so much that the hybrid human Neanderthals that were um
(19:08):
that were born as offspring um, they they mated with
other Neanderthals or other humans. But because there were more
sapiens I'm sorry, more sapiens than there were Neanderthals, the
likelihood was that a hybrid would be much more likely
to mate with a sapient and then that hybrid would
be even more watered down neanderthal And then over time
(19:31):
because of exactly and Neanderthals didn't die off, they didn't
get chased out, they just became part of that larger
human genome. So there's another theory too that's interesting, or
another interpretation. I guess it's not a theory. And this
has to do with climate change. Um. They did a
(19:51):
study into and well this year actually two thousand nineteen
in France, and they discovered that all you need over
the course of about ten thousand years is about a
two point seven decrease in fertility rates UM to go
bye by ten tho years for a decrease in UM
first time young neandertal mothers that population, and they said
(20:16):
cut that in half basically are close to it. Within
four thousand years, you would need only an eight percent
decrease in fertility and that same group. So it's very Uh,
it makes a lot of sense that with a little
bit of climate change and a little bit of scarcity
and just uh, it didn't have to be anything drastic,
but over that amount of time, if you don't have
(20:39):
any as many calories going into your body in your
first time under twenty year old, uh Neanderthal mother, you're
not going to be successful and you're not gonna be
as fertile. And then over time that just means you
kind of very quietly and slowly go away. Yeah, I
got this. I think I found this article from Live Science,
and in it they say, by the way, um, if
the human replace meant rate dropped to one point three
(21:02):
babies per mother, we'd be gone in three hundred years.
So so just a very slight drop among the neandertals
could have accounted for that four thousand to ten thousand
year process of just suddenly disappearing. And again in this
this interpretation, humans didn't do anything. We didn't war with them,
we didn't outcompete them, we didn't do anything. It was
(21:25):
just something happened to the environment and it was just
harder to be fertile. And it wasn't all at once.
Maybe it might have been staggered in different parts of
the world exactly over over four thousand to ten thousand years.
And the reason it wasn't that Neanderthals couldn't compete, that
they couldn't survive um whereas humans could. Because Neanderthals, again,
(21:46):
their lifespan was three hundred fifty thousand years. Modern humans
have only been around for fifty to a hundred thousand years,
maybe two hundred at the outside. So Neanderthals had been
around for a very long time, had been very good
at adapting to a changing climate basically the whole time
that they were around. So it's not like they couldn't
compete or couldn't adapt and humans could. What they think
(22:07):
is that they were just way more humans, and so
our numbers probably dropped at the same rate that Neanderthal
numbers did. There was just more of us to survive
and carry on after things got better. Yeah, and in
more varied ranges in parts of the world too. That
all kind of makes sense to me. I suppose it
could be uh, both of those, climate change and lovemaking
(22:31):
right right, very easily. Yeah, they definitely go hand in hand.
Like er, should we take another break? All right, We'll
take another break and talk about what we now the
sort of current understanding of the picture of what the
Neanderthal was. Right after this, Well, now we're on the
road driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing
(22:51):
or two from Josh can chuck stuff. You should know,
all right. Mh. By the way, have you seen or
(23:12):
heard of that movie William? Uh? It was out in April,
did not do well, was not reviewed well. But it
is basically a sort of mad scientist. Not a mad scientist,
but a scientist with a mad idea. Uh. There's a
(23:33):
human Neanderthal born. They get the d n A impregnate
a modern sapient woman and she has a a Neanderthal boy, William,
and he goes to high school. I did not see that.
I had no idea about that movie. Yeah, just check
out the trailer. Oh, I don't haven't seen it. It's
not supposed to be very good, and it did not
(23:53):
look very good. But it was very much like, you know,
I just want to fit in, and he's you know,
he's he's in the andertal. He's got the regular haircut,
in the vans and the jeans and the T shirt.
He's got the big forehead and the thick man. It
does it does, and it looks like it could be
a joke, but it's real. Was there that I feel
(24:16):
good in the middle of the trailer suddenly or that
scene where like like a teen wolf or something where
he's really good at sports or something. Yeah, Man William, Yeah,
there's a weekend for you right there. Much. I'm not
gonna watch it, but I just thought it would be
it'd be worth mentioning before the emails come in. So, uh,
(24:39):
the image we're on a quest. I think UM and
sciences on a quest to sort of rehabilitate that's when
you mentioned that. But to rehabilitate the image of the
Neanderthal is this hunched over brute. Part of the problem is, uh,
they sort of based in an entire EC's on this
(25:01):
one hunched over uh dude, skeleton skeleton, and they're like,
look at them that they're all hunched over oaths shambling
And now they're like, oh, actually that individual may have
had a degenerative bone disease. And what we now think
is they just walked around like we do and probably
looked a lot like we do. Um. They think that
(25:22):
from like sequencing the Neanderthal genome, they think that at
least some of them had red hair and light colored skin, which,
by the way, by interbreeding UM with Neanderthals recent arrivals
from Africa, their hybrid offspring would have been conferred with UM, thicker,
(25:42):
straighter hair, a smaller compact frame, all sorts of stuff
that you would need UM in this colder climate of
eur Asia from having just come up from Africa over
the last few generations. So there was good stuff, there
was also bad. So they think some of the disease
that we suffer from h is is actually related to
Neanderthal DNA that doesn't have a context or a point
(26:06):
or a function like it used to, and that that
now it's actually producing disease in us. Yeah, like the
same d NA, Like they could have had the same
things that we associate with diabetes and crones, but they
would have didn't affect them like it does us because
lifestyle and everything that how we diverged precisely really interesting.
I think there's actually that's the alternative explanation for the
(26:29):
hygiene hypothesis. I did these these both sort of linked
in some ways right there. So behaviorally, it's, uh, we're
again we're trying to get away from this idea of
caveman uh and things that we thought were strictly sapient.
Over the years, it turns out that Neanderthals were actually
(26:49):
good at like making tools. Uh, and this really interesting technique, uh,
the Leva leva loire technique, which is basically, I am
in the area where I have the resources to make
all the tools, but we got to pack up and leave,
and we don't know if we're going to have this
stuff there. Yeah, there's some dinosaurs after us. Yeah. So
(27:10):
like the very like raw resource, like let's say it's
just a certain type of stone. So we're gonna pre
shape all these things into it's sort of a rudimentary uh,
a rudimentary tool that we can later make into a
hammer or a chisel, like, depending on what we need.
But we're gonna kind of sort of pre shape them here,
pack them up, and take them all with us, so
we'll have this little factory that we can set up
(27:32):
anywhere we want, depending what we need. That's smart it is,
and it's a technological innovation that is definitely attributed to
the Neanderthals, like they came up with. It's awesome. Um
and tool making, Like we knew that older archaic humans
were good with tools, going back probably a million or
so years. Chimps use tools, they use termmite sticks. So
(27:53):
people are saying like great, like the Neanderthals like created
some sort of like new technology, some new tool called sure. Um,
who cares. It still doesn't make them smart. But there's
other stuff we found out about Neanderthals that we started
that have really kind of changed our view of them
because they're doing things or they we found out they're
capable of things that that they are supposed to Those
(28:15):
are the things that make humans humans like Neanderthals aren't
supposed to have been doing this. But the more evidence
we're getting, the with the fresher eyes were looking at
existing evidence, it's starting to look like they were behaviorally
modern like humans, or there's a really good chance that
they were Yeah like the sapes. Uh, they could they
could spark fire, So the old notion like quest for fire,
(28:37):
that they just had to sit around and wait for
lightning to strike a bush is not true. They use
that fire to cook food, they think, they think, which
is a big deal. It's open to interpretation stuff. Um.
What else they know from studying the injuries on the
animals that they hunted, that they were very intelligent hunters
and they killed big, big animals at close range, which
(29:00):
meant that they were skilled, that they understood risk that
they were brave and that they will get into communication more.
But you've got to be communicating to to do something
like that. Yeah, because they would hunt in packs, but
they would do it in close range. And I was
at the Velociraptor. Oh I think so Jurassic Park. Uh
the uh while they threw me off? Sorry, do you
(29:23):
think I'd be expecting in this episode? Though? You know
it wasn't they do hunting packs? Though? It was. I
was just appropriating that line. But what was it? Oh man,
they do travel in they do pack lightly, Yeah, that
was it? Okay? So Um, the fact that these guys
would take on reindeer and bison and mammoths at close
(29:46):
range with like spears and javelins and like, you know,
some some hand to hand combat type stuff has really
kind of undermined that that replacement model idea that humans
came in and just killed off all the Neanderthals, right
because they just stood no chance. They right, Neanderthals were tough,
tough mos. Yes, most um one of the big ones here.
(30:11):
And this is where it gets super interesting, I think
to me is the use of symbols. That is something
that we thought was very much sapien very sapey, right,
if if they can, if they we can show that
Neanderthals understood symbols and had that kind of higher thought
that would make them behaviorally equivalent to humans. Yeah, and
(30:34):
we're talking like anything sen Yeah, the sapes. We're talking
anything from making a like a necklace out of beads
to wear like an adornments, to using like pigments on
the face like the precursor to make up and stuff
like that. And humans have been shown to UM to
have been doing that at least for the last eighty
thousand years SAPs. And I don't know why I can't
(30:56):
get that UM sapes have been doing that is the
earliest evidences at two sites in Ethiopia. And this is
they think it was like for you know, identity or
jewelry or something like that, but it is like that's
not something you just do like this is there's a
there's not necessarily a practical function to it, and it's
(31:18):
a form of art. And there's ambiguous evidence that Neanderthals
did this too, that there was body adornment, that there
was that they would color themselves and pigments put on
makeup basically, right, So here's the thing question. So that
would suggest that Okay, if Neanderthals do that and humans
(31:38):
did that too, then that makes Neanderthals equivalent to humans behaviorally.
But the people who are big time into the replacement
model that the Neandertals were actually kind of stupid and
humans are the pinnacle and the first example of higher intelligence. UM.
They say, well, if you really kind of date some
of this stuff that the Neanderthals may, it's probably around
(32:01):
the time that humans showed up. And it's really just
Neanderthals copying what they saw humans doing. But there's no
symbol symbolism to it in that like they could copy
a shell as an ornament, but there they didn't have
any meaning. Yeah, which is a really sort of a
snotty approach, I think so too. Well, they might have
done it, but they were just copying, no copying. Remember
(32:26):
that kid, you know the kids doing now he or
she is running the company? Is that Dennis Snoven ice
cream man manager, ice cream factory manager. So, uh, cave art.
Let's talk about cave art because this is this is
the one thing that UM to make art is the
(32:48):
one thing that traditionally have always separated sapes from everyone else, right, Like,
if everybody's saying, okay, even if Neanderthals came up with
body adornments, that's not art, we're gonna raise the bar, right,
this is what the poo poers say, that doesn't really
qualify as art. Cave art is where it's at. If
(33:09):
you could show me Neanderthals that created cave art, I
will agree that they are behaviorally equivalent to modern humans
of their era. Yeah, and they found cave art modern
sas man. They found cave art at the same time
that there were Neanderthals around caves. But um, again, there
was just like, oh, well that was the sapes, right,
(33:30):
That wasn't the Neanderthals doing that? Right? They think that
the sapiens came in and made that cave art, right, Like,
we need an ambiguous proof at this point. Here's the problem.
Radio carbon dating gets unreliable after forty years, and it
requires organic material to date these pigments. They're using mineral pigments,
not organic ones, so that was a problem. But and
(33:53):
this is kind of mind blowing. In two thousand eighteen,
they discovered or I guess perfected a dating technique that
measures the rate of decay of uranium atoms and calcite deposits.
So that's what makes up stalactites and stalagmites in limestone case. Yeah.
So the idea is if you find cave art's sort
of like the mosquito called an amber, it's a time stamp.
(34:15):
If you find cave art that's underneath uh some of
this deposits that have dripped down over it and encased it,
you can date that. Then you know how old that
cave art is. Yeah, because the cave arts under the calsite,
you know how old the ca the cal site is,
then the cave art has to be at least as
old or slightly older than the earliest deposit of calcite.
What's what's the big secret? Well, there was sped There
(34:37):
was a study in two thousand and eighteen that found
that some cave art in in a cave in Spain
was created sixty four thousand years ago, a full twenty
thousand plus years before Homo sapiens showed up in the area,
which means that it had to have been Neanderthals that
created this cave art. Do you know what the Brewers said?
(34:59):
What that's not really art? What swear to god, are
you serious? He's like some hand stencils and some dots
on the wall. That doesn't count. That's the first art,
yea tracing their hand to make a turkey. They are
really holding on for dear life. But it's it's some
people are really swimming against this current, like they do
not want the idea that humans are not uniquely um
(35:22):
uh special. I guess in that sense that people have
been thinking that it was humans and Homo sapiens that
have the ability to create art and think symbolically. Um.
And it's starting to look like that's not the case.
Not only that that not it's not just humans, and
that maybe Neanderstals did too, But that's possible that this
(35:43):
kind of stuff evolved even further back, and that Heidelberg
INSTIs are less common ancestor running around seven thousand years
ago may have created art and may have been doing
all this other stuff too that makes us uniquely human. Well. Um.
Another one is music. They have found bones from cave
bears in Southeast Europe that had these holes and they're like, hey,
(36:07):
looks like a flute to me, And he's like a flute.
It sounds like a flute. Um. So it's Jethro Tull. Uh.
That's so. I'm so glad that they added flute to
their outfit. Not many groups Marshall Tucker band had the flute.
And here's a little something for you. I mean I
(36:27):
told the story, but I was in our little local
market getting some food about two years ago, remember that,
and there was a guy in a band, clearly and
he was like a play flute for Marshall Tucker. It's like,
are you kidding? No, I'm not sorry, Like you're one
of the two most famous flutists in rock music. But
it wasn't. The original guy I found out still plays
(36:48):
flute from Marshall Tuck agreed. Just because he didn't write
those flute parts doesn't make him any less of a flutist.
He could still play. Yeah. So uh, anyway, they the
naysayer with the flute or just like, oh no, man,
those are just they were bones chomped on by hyena teeth. Yeah,
the the flute holes, the finger holes are teeth teeth marks. Yeah,
(37:11):
and sure you can play aqualong on it, but that's
just because the hyenas in their teeth marks. Right. Um,
there's a there's also really good evidence, cumulative evidence. There's
one other thing about the cave art that we didn't say, sculpture.
Uh well, that was one thing that they found what
looks to be stalactite, like purposeful arrangements of stalactites in
(37:35):
a cave. That's from a hundred and seventy six thou right, Um,
But no, there are other similar cave art paintings in
Spanish caves um are in different places. So they think
it was an actual part of Neandertal culture. There wasn't
one particularly imaginative Neanderthal who happened to leave it behind. Yes,
(37:56):
and it even said this is art love tuk tuk right,
find me on insta at took took oh if only? Um? So.
The the other thing that there's a lot of a
mass evidence for is that Neanderthals appeared to have buried
(38:17):
they're dead. This is pretty cool. This is enormous because Okay,
not only can they think symbolically and like art and
creating representations of things that may or may not exist,
they can they're thinking about something coming after this. You
don't just bury a corpse for many reasons other than
(38:37):
um spiritual reasons. I mean, you can to keep like
you know, the wolves away because you're going to camp
near the corpse. But if you're a hunter gather, you
just move camp and you can leave the person laying
out there in the bush by for the wolves to take.
It doesn't matter because there's no afterlife. If you bury somebody,
it indicates you're thinking about something beyond this life, and
(38:58):
that is definitely higher level thing. King. Yeah, and when
we say Barry, we don't mean they just found this
body like on the floor of a deep cave, like
they dug a hole and placed a body in their
positioned them in a specific way they found Yeah, different
like grave sites basically like cemeteries of bodies buried in
the same manner. And they even found in Northern Iraq
(39:20):
pollen flower pollen, which clearly suggests that they buried them
with flowers. They definitely seems to that's like, that's a funerary, right,
unless it was just an accident and they just dropped
a bunch of flowers on the way up, which I mean,
it's possible, but it seems unlikely. I don't know if
I'm being naive, but I really want to believe this. Yeah, well,
(39:40):
it's nice, it's refreshing to think about. You know, humans
don't have to have for sapiens don't have to have
the market corner. We can share the humanity. Yeah, here's
another one. Um, if they were just brutes who you know,
who didn't have any capacity to understand things take care
of one another. They found individuals and one in particular
(40:05):
that was deaf, likely visually impaired because of a blow
to the head from as a ute, probably from a sapien,
maybe was missing his right hand, and then suffered a
disease that reduced his mobility. And they found this person
lived into his forties, maybe up to fifty. Yeah, which
(40:25):
there's no way this person would have survived without a
community of people taking care of and making sure that
this person survived and ate and got around and moved
along with them. Yeah, because they cared for one another
and tried to heal one another. Right, Yeah, they took
care of their sick. They're injured, they're they're disabled, they're ill.
Um they like, they took they shared resources with them.
(40:47):
People who couldn't necessarily contribute still got stuff from the
from the community, which suggests this as tight knit social
group that cared for one another. And then what about language?
So this one just knocked my socks off. There are
these Dutch researchers who wrote a paper that argued that, um,
(41:07):
Neanderthals almost certainly spoke a nuanced language that we would
recognize as a modern language. UM. And that not only
did Neanderthals speak this speak their own language, probably Heidelbergensis
and maybe even further back in our archaic family line
spoke language too, And that if that's true. If that's
(41:30):
the case, Neanderthals had their own language, and human humans
absorbed Neanderthal's both culturally and genetically, it's entirely possible that
there are traces of Neanderthal language that still appear in
our languages that are spoken around the world today unbeknownst
to us. Man, if they could find out those words,
isn't that amazing? Yeah, it's pretty cool. I love that.
(41:54):
I like all this. I love you Neanderthals, love you
Sapien Tuck and uh, I think I used to just
throw tuk Took around in various ways, but then you
developed a taste for watching him make luck. That's right.
But let me just from this point forward, took Took
is clearly uh deep No, clearly Neanderthal. Oh I think
(42:17):
I kind of just threw Took Took's name around as
any kind of early man. Yeah, he could have been
Captain Caveman. He could have been the Geigo Caveman. But
he could be William for all I know. You know,
I thought about I thought about it. The so Tuk
Took is officially Neanderthal, yes, okay, Um, the Geico Caveman
is actually a really good for the struggle between the
(42:41):
interpretation of Neanderthals today, Like everybody's like it's so easy
a caveman could do it, and this guy is playing
like squash and driving a Porsche. Yeah. Do you remember
that there their short lived TV show. I remember that
it existed, but I never saw it. They drove one
of them drove a Porsche. Yeah, and now a word
from Geico. Uh okay. Well, if you want to know
(43:02):
more about Neanderthals, start reading up about it. And there's
a pretty amazing exhibit funded by one of the Koke
brothers if I'm not mistaken, at the Smithsonian where you
can see a real live Neanderthal skeleton. Really pretty beautiful. Um,
what's their angle right something? Maybe maybe they're trying to
rehabilitate neandertals for some reason to bring him back his
(43:25):
exploited workers. And since I just said something about the
Koke Brothers, time for go ahead administrative. Okay, Chuck, as
I said, it's time for administrative. Is this like a
(43:52):
family guy where you're just gonna do that? All right,
We're gonna start this one off. This is when we
thank listeners for sending in kindness is to us and
Michelle from Crown Royal. Oh, yes, once again the booze
company that just keeps giving I know, they just keep
us in booze. Thanks a lot for that. And I
just wrote down more booze. But we'll go ahead and
(44:15):
plug the Crown Royal rye. What about those, um, those
glasses they gave us, so they're like these the rocks
classes tumblers. Um, got a good hef to them, nice shape,
size bottom and then yeah in that thick bottom th
h I C C bottom. Um, there is a laser
etched CROWMB Royal three D logo which is like so classy.
(44:38):
Your pinky can't touch the glasses physically impossible. Yeah, it
just sticks straight up in the air when you're drinking
out of these glass Oh, A lot of research went
into that design, you know, to make sure that pinky
was nowhere near the box. Um. Aaron Clark, Speaking of pinkies,
Aaron Clark sent us a Twinkie the kids statue. Thanks Aaron,
(44:59):
that's right. Um. Monica and kam A in Fukushima, Japan
said it's a nice, very nice handwritten letter and some
fuku stuff pin stickers, calendars, magazine where uh it's I
got at the desk. I didn't share that with you
and they said, uh, things are much better now good.
(45:20):
That's cryptic, but yes, I'm glad. Um so we haven't
done this in a little while. I want to say
thank you very much for the Christmas cards from Heather
k and Sri Lanka and one from Renee and Eric Chester.
It's very kind of you, guys. Here's one maybe the
weirdest thing we've ever gotten, but one of the most awesome.
(45:41):
Scott Borderlan remember our Wendy's Chili Finger episode. He sent
us Wendy's Chili from that Wendy's Wow, I think you're
out of town. Yeah, it obviously was no good by
the time it got to me even and he was like,
I know, this is not I'm not expecting you to eat.
This would eat. But he taped it up and he
(46:01):
was like, this is chili from that very Wendy's. That's amazing.
He just thought it would be kind of fun. You
may be right, that may be the weirdest thing Withishiyah,
but not even freeze dried. And then there's Brooke Bergen.
Send a T shirt and stickers of his work and
you can check out its very very awesome work. I
believe his it could be a girl um and you
(46:24):
can check out they're awesome work at Brooks Bergen b
r O O K S b U r G A
and dot com. That's right. That raises a point. If
you want to send us the pronoun you identify with,
we are more than happy to abide by that. Claire
Sanchez and his skincakes, Oh yeah, very simple, delicious. Teresa
(46:47):
sent us really awesome quilted hand quilted postcards. That's yeah, beautiful. Again,
we haven't done this in a while. Sorry for everybody
who's been sitting around waiting having to listen to every
episode just on the off chance that administrative details is on.
So everyone, Jerry just stopped us right in the middle
and said I have one. We always go on and
(47:08):
on about Jerry and her miso. Uh, big ups to
Adam Brenton in Japan sent Jerry so miso, how about
that way to go, Adam. Jerry got her own gift
after eleven years, after all this time, our very own
gift and meaning we didn't also get me so and
we even asked him she's hoarding it? Yeah, because we
(47:29):
share with Jerry. She didn't didn't go both ways. We
tried to. Yeah. Uh, so let's see Joanna send us
delicious beer chocolates. Remember those? Um she brought him to
our Portland's show I believe, Yeah, yeah, and they were awesome.
So thanks a lot, Tina, you don't remember him because
they were beer chocolates. Tammy and Justin send us miniature
(47:50):
clay figures handpainted, which is very very sweet, along with
a very nice letter. We got a postcard from Vienna,
probably not Voyanna Georgia. I think it was v Austria,
like the real one from Pauline. Thanks a lot, Pauline,
Michelle and Nevin of Smithtown, New York. Sin us wedding
imitation um, happy marriage, guys, mozl tov uh and then
(48:12):
we gotta thank you note from Mitch m I C H.
But it rhymes with rich, So thank you for the
thank you note. Mitch Lowell Hutchinson sent us some uh oh,
these are wonderful. There some hand lathed pins. Remember Lowells
the one who sponsored are She's one of our elephant sponsors. Yeah, yeah,
hand painted wood lathed pins. Yeah, man, very very beautiful.
(48:35):
And on that note, we actually got a lot of pins,
and I don't think I wrote all of them down
because we did our episode on pens and people felt
compelled to send us their favorite pen and spread the
pen love. So if we forgot your pen, big apologies.
Yeah for real, that was very nice. And by the way,
also again um, you can check out Lowell's turned wood
(48:57):
creations and by the way, she donates of all sales
to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust too, So go to
at c dot com slash shop slash l O W
E L L h U T C H D E
S I G N S wonderful Joe gather Coles and
his T shirts and c d s from his horror
punk band Headstone Horrors. It's a great name. Yeah. Uh
(49:21):
And then let's see I've only got I got three more. Okay,
I've got a book from Nick Kemper. Thanks a lot
for the book. Nick. That is beautiful of you. Mike
n s. And it's a box of coffee crisps and
they are delicious and they are long gone. Yeah, I
can attest they are very yummy. Thanks Mike. And then uh,
we got a an amazing illustration of us with a
(49:41):
peacock by Cali. Thanks for that. It's a great one.
All right. I got two more um adam Resus and
s Megalodon teeth. Yes for pretty awesome. Yeah, they are
in large as you would expect. You got another one.
I'm done, all right, my last one. Then, Kathy Hutton
send us some dog collars. She works for a nonprofit
(50:03):
spay and neuter clinic in Washington State. Curly Tailed Hawk
is who makes these collars, and they donate a dollar
from every collar that you can just go to Curly
Tailed Hawk dot com and get your dog a new
collar already, and some of that money will go to
the spay and neuter clinic, which is great. There you go, Well,
thank you everybody. If you want to get in touch
(50:25):
with us, you don't have to send us anything. You
can just say hi. Go on to our social networks
and you can find all the links at stuff you
Should Know dot com. You can also send us an
email to stuff podcast at i heart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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