Check Out These Amazing Neanderthal Bones!

They once put a big kink in the assumed Neanderthal timeline, now they fit right in.

Transcript

00:00 [music]

00:03 Neanderthals were humanity's closest relatives, sharing 99.6% of our DNA,

00:08 but they went extinct while we continued on.

00:11 And understanding the how, why, and when of that disappearance

00:14 has been one of archaeologists' greatest unanswered questions.

00:17 And a new radiocarbon dating of Neanderthal remains from the Spy Cave in Belgium

00:21 may have just helped provide some evidence for the when.

00:24 Originally, the specimens were thought to be quite young, around 24,000 years old,

00:28 but Neanderthals were thought to have gone extinct around 40,000 years ago.

00:31 So using improved radiocarbon sample collecting techniques,

00:35 primarily accounting for any contaminants,

00:37 or rather than going after collagen to collect the radiocarbon date of the creature's demise,

00:41 scientists instead extracted the building blocks of collagen,

00:44 specifically particular amino acids,

00:46 giving them samples uncontaminated by environmental conditions or modern man.

00:51 This revealed that the previously theory-breaking Neanderthal remains from the Spy Cave

00:55 were actually between 44,200 and 40,600 years old,

00:59 or nearly twice the age as previously dated.