- 16/06/2025
Documentary, PBS First Peoples 2015-06-2of5 in Africa
PBS First Peoples in Africa
PBS First Peoples in Africa
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00:00Africa, our homeland. This is where it all began. We are all Africans.
00:11But when our species emerged, there were other ancient types of humans still living in Africa.
00:21What part did they play in our evolution?
00:27Did we interbreed with them and produce hybrid children?
00:36This sample made mankind much older than what the scientists had been theorizing for years.
00:44Variation is key to evolution. It's what evolution works on.
00:48And it's exactly why hybridization is such a powerful evolutionary force.
00:52It's a story of many first peoples, not just one.
00:56It's a story about diversity.
00:59Scientists are rethinking the origins of our species.
01:04We are not the people we thought we were.
01:07This is the story of our ancestors. As they spread to every continent of the world.
01:25What was the secret to their success?
01:31Their story is our story.
01:34Your11 countries.
01:53Eastern Africa. 195,000 years ago.
01:58Hunters on the savannah.
02:03They have the same body shape as us, the same brain.
02:10Archaeologists know this man as Omo I.
02:17He's destined to die while still in his 20s.
02:23But his death will resonate through time.
02:25It's the first we know of, by a member of our species.
02:36He is one of us.
02:55Omo I lived here in the Omo Valley.
03:13Today, it's bone dry.
03:14But 195,000 years ago, this was a lush wetland.
03:20A great home for prehistoric people.
03:22Two U.S. scientists know this site well.
03:33Anthropologist John Flegel and archaeologist John Shea.
03:39They're based in New York.
03:43But for the last 15 years, they've been coming here to find out more about the life and times of Omo I.
03:52This is a very different world from New York.
04:05It's like a trip back in time.
04:08A journey to the origin of our species.
04:09Omo I was discovered in 1967 by an international expedition to southern Ethiopia.
04:26They came looking for human fossils, eroding out of the ancient sediments.
04:30And sure enough, they found the remains of three prehistoric humans.
04:46The most complete skeleton was that of Omo I.
04:49But in the 1960s, no one knew just how old he was.
05:00For three decades, Omo I was a fossil in search of a story.
05:08That changed when John Flegel and John Shea came to the Omo Valley in the early 2000s and reopened the site.
05:19This is it.
05:21The lost world.
05:23Very spectacular.
05:26The big question was, how long ago did modern humans originate in Africa?
05:31Here were modern human skeletons, but we didn't know how old they were, but there were hints that they were very, very old.
05:39There were people who were saying, you know, this stuff's probably 20 or 30,000 years old.
05:43There was an old date that said it was perhaps as much as 100,000 years old.
05:49It was something that needed to be resolved.
05:56The bones were too old for carbon dating.
06:00That technique only reaches back 50,000 years.
06:03But by analyzing levels of argon in the sediment, it's now possible to produce an accurate timeline of the entire landscape.
06:15The bones of Omo I were from a layer that was 195,000 years old.
06:28When we got that date of 195, we thought, oh my, we never, I don't think we ever thought it would quite be that old.
06:44The human family tree starts two and a half million years ago.
06:49Before that time, we were more ape than human.
06:57Ever since, there have been innumerable branches, twigs and shoots, giving rise to different species with strange names.
07:08Archaeologists classify them all as archaic humans.
07:12What makes Omo I so special is that he is a modern human, a member of our species, Homo sapiens.
07:33Omo I stood as tall as a modern-day African and weighed 160 pounds.
07:39He hunted giant hog and antelope.
07:45But one day, Omo I could hunt no more.
07:52There's no evidence his bones were ever moved or buried.
07:57For 195,000 years, they lay where he died.
08:09The one thing we know about this site, the one irreducible fact about Omo I, is that this is the place where Omo I died.
08:22He would probably be off to the side someplace, surrounded by members of his family.
08:27His wife, his children, his best friend, his brother, his sister.
08:34Maybe caring for him, trying to make him comfortable.
08:37Or he might have been left behind, as often happens amongst hunter-gatherers.
08:50Not callously, but this is just what happens if you can't keep up with the group as it's moving.
08:56They give you food, they make people comfortable, and they have to leave them behind.
09:01Nothing behind.
09:03That's part of life.
09:20Over the years, John Shea has been collecting evidence about the way people lived at the Omo Valley.
09:26You always look underneath the acacia bush, that's where all the good stuff hides.
09:34He's impressed by their ingenuity.
09:37It's a stone tool.
09:39You can tell this because they have features on them that show where they're struck by a hammer.
09:43Nature doesn't make objects like this by itself.
09:45Very nice.
09:49I mean, these people made everything from little tiny pieces like this to great massive pieces like this,
09:55and everything else in between.
10:00Sometimes you find a lot of tools, that means that's where they made them.
10:04But isolated little tools like this, it could be they just dropped them, you know, and said,
10:08all right, I know I'm going to be coming back here.
10:10I'll just leave these tools.
10:11So here along the path, if I ever need a cutting edge, there's one right there.
10:17It's like having an ATM machine.
10:18You don't have to carry big wads of cash with you around cities because you have ATM machines.
10:24But these guys, they don't have to carry big heavy rocks around with them because the landscape's full of stone tools.
10:31Think of these things like the little debit cards of prehistory.
10:34These are people like us.
10:43They had a sense of humor.
10:45They had sadness.
10:46They had, you know, joy.
10:48There's no reason, you know, to assume that they're different from us in their emotions and their intellect.
10:54Nothing in their body says it.
10:57Nothing in the archaeology says it.
10:58The only thing that compels us to think these people are simpler than us is mythology.
11:04This idea that earlier is primitive and primitive is simple.
11:09These guys survived by their wits.
11:13They thought, they planned, and evidently they're pretty successful because they're descendants.
11:19Plus, they're still here.
11:20Ancient skeletons such as Omo-1 suggest Eastern Africa was the cradle of our species.
11:32Our Garden of Eden.
11:41The prevailing theory is that modern humans burst into life in this one region 200,000 years ago.
11:48And from here, we spread out across Africa, and then across the world.
11:56It's a theory backed up by DNA.
12:05In the 1980s, geneticists at Berkeley worked out how to trace human ancestry using mitochondria.
12:14They're the energy packs of a cell that sit outside the nucleus.
12:21Each of them contains a tiny coil of DNA passed on from mother to daughter.
12:29People weren't used to thinking about DNA evidence having anything to do with questions on human evolution or anthropology or human origins.
12:40So that was a new concept that this could actually weigh in on the debate of where humans came from and how long ago instead of looking at just fossil evidence.
12:49As mitochondrial DNA is passed on, it picks up mutations over time.
13:00By counting these mutations, it is possible to work out when every woman on Earth last shared a common ancestor.
13:09The research pointed to someone living in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
13:25The same sort of time as Omo-1.
13:34She became known as Mitochondrial Eve.
13:37She's the most recent common ancestor of all of us.
13:42Of course, she had a mom who would then be the common ancestor of all of us as well.
13:46But she was living further back in time.
13:48Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common ancestor of all of us.
13:52Geneticists have taken the same approach with the Y chromosome, which has passed down the male line from father to son.
14:08The most recent common ancestor of every man alive today also lived in Africa.
14:14He became known as Y-chromosomal Adam.
14:27Genetic Adam and Eve, they didn't know each other, but they have the same story to tell.
14:34The take-home message was that we have a very recent common origin in Africa.
14:38So that the differences that we see among us that are so evident with hair and skin color are perhaps really recent and rather superficial.
14:49It's become a truism that we are a young species and can all trace our roots back to a single source.
14:59According to our genes and our bones, that source was Eastern Africa 200,000 years ago.
15:09That's the theory. But is it entirely true?
15:13Our creation story may not be quite so simple.
15:17The Max Planck Institute is one of the leading centers in the world for research into human evolution.
15:37They can analyze fossils here, in minute detail, using a CT scanner to create 3D models.
15:56This is an African skull from a site known as Jebel Irhud.
16:00It's 300,000 years old, a 100,000 years older than Omo I.
16:12It belongs to an archaic human, someone who was not yet fully modern.
16:17It's a very ancient-looking skull when you look at it from the side.
16:27But it has, especially considering its old age, a very modern-looking face.
16:32And by that I mean it has a small face that's tucked underneath the brain case, yet the brain case shape is very elongated,
16:42which is what we find in archaic humans and not in modern humans living today.
16:47With his mix of features, the man from Jebel Irhud appears to be a forerunner of our species.
17:02A modern human in waiting.
17:04The start of a species is always blurry and messy.
17:10This is a process that takes thousands and thousands of years, sometimes millions of years.
17:16And we can see here that modern humans evolved their faces first and their brain cases later.
17:25What's striking about this man is where he lived.
17:29Jebel Irhud is not in Ethiopia, but 3,000 miles away, in Morocco, on the other side of Africa.
17:44Why would a forerunner of our species have lived so far from our supposed birthplace?
17:53Perhaps there wasn't a single birthplace, but different hotspots,
17:57all contributing something to our evolution.
18:07The significance of this particular fossil from Morocco is that it shows us that modern human origins was not restricted to one place in East Africa,
18:18but it happened on a continental scale all over Africa.
18:20The trademark features of a modern human may have evolved separately.
18:28A rounder brain case in one region.
18:31A higher forehead in another.
18:34A smaller jawbone elsewhere.
18:37But how did these features then merge together?
18:40Into a single blueprint that became modern humans.
18:56In the early days of our species, different groups must have been connected in some way.
19:02Perhaps they met, mated, and shared genes.
19:09That's what anthropologist John Hawkes thinks happened.
19:16He believes that social networks existed across the continent.
19:25It only needed each group to expand as far as the next,
19:31for contact to be maintained over huge distances.
19:35All over Africa, archaeologists have found shells like this.
19:46This is a Nassaria shell.
19:48And it has a hole in it, because this shell was strung on a string and worn as an ornament.
19:55They've been found in North Africa, in South Africa, and in Israel.
19:59Thousands of miles apart, same kind of shell, the same technique, the same intent.
20:08Anybody can pick up a shell and be interested in it.
20:13But thinking of how to drill a hole and wear it,
20:17and create a signal, that's a really distinctive idea.
20:24That kind of long-distance movement of ideas suggests that
20:27people are moving into each other's territories.
20:32It's not only ideas that are spreading.
20:34It's also genes.
20:36That's what humans do when they're in contact with each other.
20:40They start mating.
20:42They're having babies.
20:50You start to see populations merging together.
20:54Where once you'd had very different groups of people,
20:58really different in what they looked like, how they act,
21:01you start to see the building of a single community.
21:04A community that we call modern humans.
21:05The movement of prehistoric people was affected by the climate,
21:18which fluctuated over thousands of years.
21:23In bad times, Africa was so dry, the Sahara was an uncrossable barrier.
21:28But in good times, when the climate was wet, the desert disappeared.
21:37Any adaptation that emerged in one part of Africa could spread to other parts of the continent.
21:45Just as easily as shell beads.
21:49Until recently, many archaeologists and anthropologists were looking for a single origin for modern humans.
22:01Like a Garden of Eden scenario that would explain why we're all alike.
22:05But we now know that things didn't happen that way.
22:08I think that our origins were very much like this.
22:13More like a river.
22:16Where water is finding its own path.
22:19Sometimes separating and then coming back together.
22:22But always flowing on.
22:24Modern human origins is like that.
22:27It's a story of many first peoples, not just one.
22:31It's a story about diversity.
22:32According to this way of thinking, we are a species born of many parents across Africa.
22:48Our roots are more tangled than we ever realized.
23:02The story has just gotten more intriguing, thanks to amateur genealogist Jacqueline Johnson.
23:20She's fascinated by her great-great-grandfather, Albert Perry,
23:25who appears on the 1870 census as a freed slave in South Carolina.
23:34He's 43, listed on here.
23:38So that means he was born about 1827.
23:41And there's my great-grandfather, Clyde, at the age of three, a toddler.
23:47This is the first major censors that slaves were included on, you know, with the last names.
23:53Prior to that, it was mostly recognized as somebody's property.
24:04Johnson has been able to trace her roots back five generations.
24:09But she can't find any records before 1870.
24:15This is our family tree.
24:17This is myself, my mother, my grandmother.
24:20And this is my great-great-grandfather, Albert Perry.
24:26It's frustrating that you can't go back any further than him,
24:29because, you know, people just didn't pop up and start existing in 1870.
24:34You know, they were alive before then, so where were they?
24:37They were somewhere.
24:39You know, I want to give a voice to this story.
24:41I want to find out, who is Albert Perry?
24:46I've enlisted the help of three scientists who use genetic ancestry tracing in their research.
24:53In 2006, I was watching a PBS special called African American Lives, and they were presenting DNA.
25:02We submitted second DNA samples.
25:06These samples can then be compared to DNA samples taken from around the world.
25:11They were showing people, okay, you were connected to this group of people in Liberia,
25:17and this group of people in Nigeria.
25:19And I was like, oh, that's a way I can do it.
25:21I can actually test my own DNA and find out where we connect in Africa.
25:33To track Albert Perry's lineage, she persuaded a male cousin to provide a sample of his Y chromosome.
25:44It was tested here, at Family Tree DNA.
25:47Bennett Greenspan runs the company.
25:52When I came into work the morning that the sample had been scored the night before,
25:59the technicians were actually very excited because they said,
26:03we've seen something and we've never seen anything like this before.
26:07Typically, you might find one or two or three novel mutations.
26:12But in this sample, we found between 40 and 50 novel mutations, which means it defines an entirely new subsection of the tree of mankind.
26:28The Y chromosome from Jacqueline Johnson's cousin was so unusual, it was given its own name.
26:34A-0-0.
26:37Geneticists checked thousands of other samples in their data sets, but found no one else with the same signal.
26:47Until they looked in Western Africa.
26:51The trail leads 7,000 miles from Houston to Mbeta village in Western Cameroon.
27:06In 2001, there was a program to sample DNA here.
27:11When the samples were reviewed in 2012, 11 of the men were a match for A-0-0.
27:26No one knows who they are, because the tests were anonymous.
27:30But they're the only other people in the world known to have the same Y chromosome as Jacqueline Johnson's great-great-grandfather, Albert Perry.
27:45He must have lived in Mbeta, before being transported as a slave to the United States,
27:52carrying with him the A-0-0-Y chromosome.
28:03What's so remarkable about this chromosome is its age.
28:10By counting the number of mutations, it's been dated at 338,000 years old,
28:17which means it entered the modern human gene pool before modern humans were even thought to exist.
28:29This sample was kind of history-shattering.
28:33It was older than anything that science had ever seen in a male-inherited Y chromosome.
28:41And that's what made this discovery so interesting, because this made mankind actually much older than what the scientists had been theorizing for years.
29:00Until recently, the timeline of our species seemed clear.
29:04Every man on Earth could trace his ancestry back to genetic Adam.
29:11Every woman back to genetic Eve.
29:16The earliest fossil evidence goes back 195,000 years to Omo-1.
29:24300,000 years ago lived a forerunner of our species in Jebel Irhud.
29:39But this Y chromosome was older than all of them.
29:44A piece of modern human DNA that was 338,000 years old.
29:51Potentially, a new start date for our species.
29:58When the results came, I was excited.
30:02Now his name is in the book.
30:04Can you imagine?
30:06From a slave, unknown, kind of like somebody's property.
30:10And all of a sudden, it's known around the world.
30:12To understand more about the A00Y chromosome, geneticists need more samples.
30:26Matthew Fomina Forca is the local researcher who did the initial sampling in Mbeta village.
30:33I've come here because this is the Kuombo community where I collected DNA samples 12 years ago.
30:4212 years ago, the sample were analyzed and realized that this population has the 11 samples who belong to the A00,
30:51implying that those A00 which are found here have contributed to the beginning of humanity.
30:57Today, we are continuing the DNA collection that has started in 2001.
31:07I am going to swap them out with a sterile cotton.
31:12Unfortunately, the climate of Cameroon is too wet to preserve ancient human fossils.
31:19So DNA is the only way to find out if our species really did emerge here.
31:32But there is another possibility.
31:35Another reason for the age of the A00Y chromosome.
31:44Perhaps we inherited it from a different species of human.
31:49Although we are now the only humans on the planet, it was not always this way.
32:06For tens of thousands of years, the forests of Africa would have been shared.
32:13Between modern humans and archaic humans.
32:16It's been assumed there was little, if any, contact between them.
32:27But what if that assumption is wrong?
32:33What if DNA passed from one species of human to another?
32:38There may have been archaic forms of humans that lived in Western Africa.
32:50That happened upon modern populations.
32:54And this Y chromosome was introduced into the modern population through interbreeding.
32:59Although modern humans were a distinct species, they seem to have mated with other, older species of human.
33:12And picked up parts of their DNA.
33:15That would help to explain why we found a 338,000-year-old Y chromosome in a very small pocket of humanity in Western Cameroon.
33:27For the last hundred years or so, it's been very convenient to think that humans originated in a very simple way in a garden of Eden.
33:40But now we know from the DNA itself that matings between different forms, archaic forms, modern forms have been going on.
33:50Who knows how long that's going back in time.
33:53Which, in fact, makes us a lot more like the rest of nature.
33:56Something similar has shown up in Southern Cameroon.
34:10These rainforests are home to the pygmies.
34:19They are some of the last traditional hunter-gatherers on Earth.
34:22Living in much the same way as they have for a hundred thousand years.
34:29Finding food, wherever they can.
34:31Genetically, the pygmies are as close as anyone to Africa's first modern humans.
34:53And their DNA is very revealing.
35:00Rather than looking only at the Y chromosome, or mitochondria, geneticists can now analyze six billion fragments across the entire pygmy genome.
35:13And they're finding regions that are so ancient and unusual, they look more archaic than modern.
35:24Again, they seem to be the result of interbreeding.
35:29But how can this be?
35:31According to the human family tree, archaic humans are different species to us modern humans.
35:43And different species are meant to be incapable of interbreeding.
35:48But in reality, it all depends how closely related they are.
35:56When they last shared a common ancestor.
35:59Mating across the species barrier was first studied more than 30 years ago.
36:14In Ethiopia's Awash Valley, there are two different species of baboons living side by side.
36:21Hamadraeus and olive baboons.
36:27And between them is a hybrid zone.
36:31Where they mate, interbreed, and hybridize.
36:36This adult male has pink buttocks similar to the Hamadraeus.
36:42While this hybrid male has the grey buttocks of an olive baboon.
36:46This variability indicates that extensive interbreeding has occurred.
36:53The research concluded that any two species of primates can interbreed.
36:59As long as they share a common ancestor within the last two million years.
37:07It's a rule that applies to all primates.
37:11Including humans.
37:16Despite being different species.
37:22Modern and archaic humans shared ancestors.
37:27Well within the last two million years.
37:30So there was nothing to stop them from interbreeding.
37:34But when the original research was done, few people saw a connection between hybrid baboons and humans.
37:50And its conclusions were ignored.
37:52Today, the idea of hybridization is being reconsidered.
38:05Rebecca Ackerman is trying to work out what a human hybrid would have looked like.
38:11By studying hybrid mice.
38:13I know using mice sounds a little bit strange.
38:17But obviously you can't hybridize people or hybridize primates in order to answer these types of questions.
38:24These hybrid mice are quite a bit different from the parent species.
38:30They differ in terms of their body size.
38:33They're bigger.
38:34They're bigger.
38:35In terms of their coat color.
38:36In terms of what their faces look like.
38:39And even more than that, they're incredibly variable.
38:42And variation is the key to evolution.
38:46It's what evolution works on.
38:47And that's exactly why hybridization is such a powerful evolutionary force.
38:50The aim of the project is to study every aspect of the hybridization process.
39:00By dissecting the muscles and soft tissue of the body.
39:05And examining the skeletons in a miniature CT scanner.
39:09The most interesting thing is to understand what the skeletons look like.
39:24And that's because it's the skeleton that's going to allow us to link this back to the human fossil record.
39:29Because of course, fossils are fossilized skeletons.
39:32One of the things that we're seeing in mice is that the hybrids have much bigger faces than their parents do.
39:42In other words, hybridization is unleashing variation, if you will, and causing faces to change.
39:49If you try and link that back to the human fossil record, we see that faces are one of the things that do change over time.
39:56And so there's that possibility that it's hybridization itself that's actually driving that change.
40:06As the population of modern humans grew, some of them moved out of Africa, perhaps 100,000 years ago.
40:16But they were not the first to make this move.
40:21Archaic humans had been leaving Africa for at least one and a half million years.
40:31Some had spent so long in Europe and Asia, they had evolved into different species.
40:43The best known of these Archaic humans are the Neanderthals.
40:47When they were discovered in the 19th century, the gulf between them and us was thought to be vast.
40:58They were ape-like brutes, inferior in every way.
41:05But over time, the Neanderthals have been rehabilitated.
41:09The evidence suggests they were more similar to us than we ever guessed.
41:20Our evolutionary cousins.
41:26If so, might we have interbred with them as well?
41:30In 2010, geneticists at the Max Planck Institute managed to crack the genetic code of a Neanderthal.
41:45They found a sample of shin bone, which still contained readable DNA after 38,000 years in a cave.
41:56Then they had to sequence the DNA.
42:02And that was a colossal task.
42:04As DNA ages, it breaks down into billions of fragments that are mixed up and contaminated with the DNA of insects and bacteria.
42:22The challenge for a geneticist is to identify the Neanderthal fragments, isolate them, and reassemble them all in the correct order.
42:37It took the sequencing machines two and a half years to produce the first genome of an extinct human.
42:54One of the first questions we were interested in was,
42:57what happened when modern humans came out of Africa and met Neanderthals?
43:01Did one mix with them or not?
43:02They compared the Neanderthal genome with that of modern-day Africans.
43:09They found no evidence of interbreeding.
43:15That was to be expected.
43:17Neanderthals lived in Europe, not Africa.
43:23Then they ran the same comparison on modern-day Europeans and got very different results.
43:32We found, to my big surprise, there was slightly more similarity between the genomes of people in Europe to the Neanderthal genome than between people in Africa and the Neanderthal genome.
43:47And even more surprising at that time was that we actually found the same sort of excess similarity when we looked at people in Asia.
43:55Wherever they looked, they kept seeing the same amount of overlap.
44:02Outside Africa, it seems that everyone in the world has inherited between one and three percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.
44:13I was really biased when we started looking at this, thinking there would be no contribution.
44:24But the data sort of forced us to see that we were wrong in that sense.
44:29And it was quite obvious that the Neanderthals live on in many people today around the planet.
44:36There's only one explanation for this.
44:44Interbreeding must have happened somewhere outside Africa.
44:49But only just outside, before we had spread around the world.
44:55Somewhere like the Middle East.
44:58Israel is a natural crossroads between Africa, Arabia and Asia.
45:13A meeting place.
45:15A melting pot of diversity.
45:18It is today, and was the same in prehistoric times.
45:23The hills of Galilee are rich in archaeological sites.
45:43The latest is known as Manat.
45:45It was discovered by accident in 2008, when a bulldozer was digging a new sewer line for the local village.
45:55The bulldozer was coming through this way.
45:59You can still see them caught on the rocks.
46:02The bulldozer reached this point, exactly where I'm standing now.
46:07Now imagine to yourself the scene.
46:11That the bulldozer is cutting through those huge rocks.
46:16And boom, boom, boom.
46:18And suddenly there was a hole there.
46:25Okay, I'm getting down.
46:26Anthropologist Israel Hershkovits was one of the first people into the cave.
46:40A former colonel in the paratroopers, he rappelled in, through the hole cut by the bulldozer.
46:46Once we, we went in, it was totally dark.
46:52We couldn't see for a meter in front of us.
46:56So when we came down, we didn't realize the, the, the, the size of the cave and how beautiful it is.
47:03And when you look down, with the top, it was one of the most amazing places I've been to my whole life.
47:11It's really an amazing cave.
47:12Since then, Manat has become a major excavation site.
47:30Archaeologists have found a mass of tools, bones and ornaments.
47:35This cool, wet cave was clearly a place for prehistoric people to make a home.
47:50But the star find was discovered away from the rest.
47:55In a side chamber of the cave.
47:58Imagine yourself going down in the dark, with just a very small torch.
48:07It looks empty, the whole room looks empty.
48:10And then suddenly, you turn your head to the right.
48:14Just on that shelf, over there, there was a skull.
48:18Just the skull, sitting on the shelf over there.
48:21Just covering with the sea layer of mud.
48:25That's it.
48:27There are no tools.
48:28There are no animal bones.
48:29There are nothing.
48:30Just the skull, sitting there, on the shelf, for 55,000 years.
48:36Waiting to be discovered.
48:38It was a human brain case.
48:46But it looked unusual.
48:49Like a mix between a modern and archaic human.
48:54The skull, in its general shape, is modern.
48:58But it still has some archaic traits.
49:02One of them is that the whole area here, at the back of the skull,
49:07has a cup-shaped appearance.
49:10It is protruding backwards.
49:12Like having some kind of a bump over here, at the back of your head.
49:16Now, if we turn the skull upside down, we can see the marks that was left by the sinuses of the brain.
49:27The pattern that we see here, it's not a modern pattern.
49:32And one of the ways to explain those mixture of characteristics in one single skull
49:37is to assume that this specimen represents some kind of interbreeding
49:42between modern humans and Neanderthals.
49:4455,000 years ago, modern humans were migrating into the Middle East.
49:56At the same time, a cold spell in Europe had pushed Neanderthals further south.
50:03The two species were destined to meet.
50:07This was a key moment in the history of our species.
50:26Face to face, for the first time, with our Neanderthal cousins.
50:31It used to be thought, we simply wiped them out.
50:49But here, it seems we were curious enough about each other to become neighbors.
50:54There are no other place in the world that modern humans and Neanderthals were living side by side,
51:05in close proximity to each other for at least 10,000 years.
51:09What was once scientific heresy, that we mated and interbred with Neanderthals, has become scientific fact.
51:25DNA revealed it.
51:37Now a skull from Galilee confirms it.
51:42This is the only skull and the only evidence, the only anthropological evidence, the only fossil evidence that we have for interpreting between Neanderthals and modern humans.
51:58This is the smoking gun.
51:59The human story is getting a rewrite.
52:13We used to think we had a clear, simple genesis.
52:18Now it seems our past is far messier.
52:22But it's also more intriguing.
52:29Ours is a story of contact with other species, our ancient cousins.
52:40We were not separate from them.
52:43They are part of us.
52:45When we look at the origin of modern humans, we see different people and we perceive them as being very different.
52:55And so we give them different names, modern humans, archaic humans.
53:00To us, those differences are really important because we can see and identify them.
53:05But let's look at it from their perspective.
53:08We don't know whether they thought that any of these differences that they saw around them were important or not.
53:12What we know is that they were interbreeding with each other.
53:18And the cool thing is that we can look within our own genes and see the evidence of that ancient interbreeding.
53:28It's as if these archaic humans still are living on inside the DNA of us all.
53:35We are all shaped by our past.
53:38Encounters that happened tens of thousands of years ago.
53:44As a result, our species is a patchwork of different types of humans.
53:52We are all hybrids.
53:57Seven billion of us across planet Earth.
54:09Next week, First Peoples returns with all new back-to-back episodes.
54:14First, we venture to Asia.
54:16They were the same people as they were in Africa and they were opportunistic.
54:19I think it was this curiosity.
54:21We want to know what's on the other side.
54:27Then, to Australia.
54:28Australia was a challenging environment.
54:31It's tremendously isolated.
54:33They were really in it by themselves.
54:35First Peoples.
54:37Back-to-back episodes starts next Wednesday, 9, 8 central.
54:45First Peoples is available on DVD.
54:48To order, visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
54:52First Peoples was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Ann Rae Charitable Trust,
55:03the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
55:06and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like this.
55:10First Peoples was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Ann Rae Charitable Trust,
55:16the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
55:18and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
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