PBS First Peoples 5of5 in Europe

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3 days ago

Documentary, PBS First Peoples 2015-06-5of5 in Europe

Transcript

00:00Today, we have Europe to ourselves.

00:07We are all modern humans.

00:11But when we first arrived in this land,

00:15it was already a home for our cousins,

00:18the Neanderthals.

00:21We used to think we were so much more advanced

00:24that we killed them off.

00:28But that may be wrong.

00:33In reality, we were so similar,

00:36we could interbreed with them

00:39and share our DNA.

00:44The old story has collapsed,

00:46and we've got to begin to tell a new story

00:48about Neanderthals and modern humans.

00:51The power of genetics is that the data will stare you in the face

00:54and force you to rethink your ideas.

00:57Neanderthals have a bad reputation of being perhaps somehow stupid,

01:01but this is not true.

01:03So why did we win out while they went extinct?

01:08This is the story of our ancestors,

01:21as they spread to every continent of the world.

01:26What was the secret to their success?

01:30their story is our story.

01:35First Peoples was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Ann Ray Charitable Trust,

01:52the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,

01:54and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

02:03Eastern Europe, 40,000 years ago.

02:13Two young men, out hunting.

02:18They're as smart as any modern-day hunter.

02:25But they're vulnerable.

02:27Newcomers in a cold northern land.

02:31These are the first modern humans we know of anywhere in Europe.

02:4940,000 years later, their remains have turned up in the forests of Romania,

02:55at Pashtera su Owase, the Cave of Bones.

03:03They were excavated by Portuguese archaeologist Joao Zilal.

03:14In 2002, Romanian cavers chanced upon a new chamber deep inside the cave.

03:20It was an archaeologist's dream.

03:25But getting to it was a nightmare.

03:31People talk about extreme archaeology.

03:35I often think to myself, there's two kinds of it.

03:39There's the Hollywood kind, and there's the real thing.

03:42And the real thing is right there.

03:44Every day, Zilal and his team had to dive through an underwater river.

03:56Climb deeper into the cave.

04:01And squeeze through the narrowest of gaps.

04:04Your body fits, but barely.

04:09And as you, you know, pull yourself out and start looking around,

04:14it's full of cave bear bones all over the place.

04:17And it's amazing.

04:19This was clearly a place where prehistoric bears had hibernated.

04:25The archaeologists started logging each bone.

04:29The temperature is about 12 degrees.

04:34There's 100% humidity.

04:36And it's dripping on top of you constantly.

04:39So it's not pleasant.

04:44You see all these bones here?

04:46Two weeks in, they found something that wasn't cave bear.

04:49That, that looks like human over there.

04:55Yeah.

05:02What else can it be?

05:04And one day, there you go.

05:07The occipital, back of the skull.

05:09You read about human evolution, but it's one thing to read about this stuff.

05:17It's a different thing to actually have the evidence in your hands.

05:24It was the skull of a teenager who lived 40,000 years ago.

05:31Nearby, they found the jawbone of another young adult from the same period.

05:35How had these bones gotten into the cave?

05:41There was no sign the bodies had been dragged in by a bear.

05:50But also, no sign the cave had been used as a home by prehistoric people.

05:56We found nothing.

05:58No artifacts.

06:00No charcoal.

06:01No features.

06:03So we conclude that people did not live in this cave.

06:06The bodies were not buried in this cave.

06:09They must have been washed in.

06:12Zalao has an intriguing explanation for what he thinks happened.

06:17Imagine two hunters, young adult or late adolescence.

06:25They're going out into the mountains to hunt.

06:29All of a sudden, there's a problem.

06:33Could have been a storm.

06:35They have an accident.

06:36They fall and they die.

06:42Then, snow covers the bodies.

06:45They get frozen and stay there.

06:47They're not eaten by scavengers.

06:49The bodies are just preserved in the snow.

06:51End of winter, come spring, water melts.

07:02You have these rushes of melt water, very powerful.

07:05Everything that was in the snow is dragged into the sinkholes that exist all over this plateau.

07:13And that's how the bodies end up in the cave.

07:16They just stay there thousands and thousands of years until we come and dig them up.

07:27These unfortunate hunters died 40,000 years ago.

07:32They are the oldest definitively modern humans, Homo sapiens, found anywhere in Europe.

07:39But they were not the first humans to call Europe their home.

07:57In 1856, an unusual skeleton was discovered in Germany, in the Neander Valley.

08:03It became known as a Neanderthal.

08:11Stockier than modern humans, with a barreled chest and super strong muscle attachments.

08:19Neanderthals have fascinated us ever since.

08:22At first, they were dismissed as wild, simple-minded cavemen.

08:30But now, we know better.

08:35If you look at the Neanderthal skull, you will notice that it's actually rather large.

08:39It's a very pronounced brow ridge, doubly arched above the eye sockets.

08:43We see a very projecting nose, with a very big nasal opening.

08:48Not only the face is large, but also the brain case is large.

08:51And this is because Neanderthal brains are larger than the average modern human brain.

08:56And this is perhaps surprising, because Neanderthals have a bad reputation of being perhaps somehow stupid.

09:04But this is not true.

09:05This doesn't mean that they would have had the exact same cognitive properties as we do,

09:11but certainly they were very similar in many respects.

09:20In the human family tree, Neanderthals are our closest cousins.

09:25Half a million years ago, their ancestors were the same as ours.

09:32But they moved out of Africa earlier, into Europe and Central Asia.

09:40There, they adapted to a colder climate and evolved into a different species.

09:46Not Homo sapiens like us, but Homo neanderthalensis.

09:55Neanderthals.

09:56They made Ice Age Europe their home, living in small groups, hunting big game.

10:09So what happened when modern humans turned up, 40,000 years ago?

10:27What did we make of the Neanderthals?

10:29It's long been thought we were so superior, we simply wiped them out.

10:39Put them out.

10:57But is this really true?

10:58really true.

11:05The remains that Joao Zilao found in Romania tell a different story.

11:13They have the features of a modern human, the small vertical face and jutting chin that

11:20first appeared in Africa 200,000 years ago.

11:27But all is not what it seems.

11:31When you look at this skull, it is obviously modern.

11:35On the other hand, when you look more closely, some things are not quite right for a modern

11:39human.

11:40For instance, the frontal bone slopes backward very markedly.

11:46The dentition in particular is very strange.

11:50The first molar is smaller than the second, the second is smaller than the third.

11:54These are features that you would not expect to find in a modern human.

11:58Where you do find such features is among the Neanderthals.

12:06Instead of wiping out the Neanderthals, Zilao believes we mated with them.

12:12And the two peoples interbred.

12:17We call these people Neanderthals and modern humans.

12:22They would not know they were Neanderthals or modern humans.

12:27You have to think about what is logical in a context like this.

12:42People have sex.

12:44And people breathe.

12:45It's just that's basic human nature.

12:57According to Zilao, the skull is a human hybrid.

13:01Part modern.

13:03Part Neanderthal.

13:06Until recently, the idea that two distinct human species could interbreed and hybridize

13:13was thought to be impossible.

13:15A scientific heresy.

13:18That's changed.

13:20Thanks to DNA.

13:21The Max Planck Institute is a leader in the study of ancient DNA.

13:40In 2010, they were the first people to crack the genetic code of a Neanderthal.

13:49The first challenge was to find the right bone, which still contained readable DNA after 38,000

13:58years in a cave.

14:02Then they had to sequence the DNA, analyzing every fragment.

14:10It was like trying to read a book that's been ripped into millions of pieces.

14:15The project was led by Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo.

14:30Imagine that what we have in this bag is the DNA we've extracted from a Neanderthal bone.

14:36And we illustrated this with an American dictionary that we have shredded.

14:40But it's not only this dictionary here, the dictionaries of other languages that illustrate the genomes

14:46of bacteria and fungi that have lived in the bone over tens of thousands of years.

14:54And our challenge is now to try to find the pieces that come from the Neanderthal genomes

15:00among all these millions and millions of other pieces that we are not interested in.

15:12What we are faced with is not only that we have a mixture of different genomes here.

15:17The pieces are also very small and they get smaller and smaller as time passes.

15:22And not only that, they are in addition chemically modified, which we can illustrate with this.

15:40Imagine having to decipher millions of fragments that are so degraded they're barely legible.

15:46And then using them to reconstruct an entire dictionary.

15:53It seems an impossible task.

15:56But that's the equivalent of what Paabo and his team had to do with the Neanderthal genome.

16:02They had one thing going for them.

16:05Because Neanderthals are our cousins, their genome was bound to be incredibly similar to ours.

16:12Written in more or less the same language.

16:19What we do is compare these tiny little DNA fragments from the Neanderthal bone to the genome of present day humans.

16:31And we expect to see just tiny differences because the Neanderthals are of course very closely related,

16:39after all, to present day people, at least ten times as close as a chimpanzee, for example.

16:46So in this analogy here, one could see this as a difference between American English and British English, for example.

16:56Which is very, very similar, but have tiny little differences in how you spell words.

17:02It's these subtle discrepancies that embody the genetic difference between Neanderthals and modern humans.

17:11It took the sequencing machines two and a half years to sift and sort through all the fragments and construct a complete sequence.

17:23But when the work was done, they had before them the first genome of an extinct human.

17:40One of the first questions we were really interested in was what happened when modern humans came out of Africa and met Neanderthals.

17:48Did our ancestors then mix with Neanderthals or not?

17:53They compared the Neanderthal genome with that of modern day people from around the world.

18:01They discovered a remarkable pattern.

18:05In Africa, they found no evidence of interbreeding.

18:08But everywhere else in the world, there was a trail of Neanderthal genes.

18:19Between one and three percent of our DNA has been inherited from Neanderthals.

18:25I was first very skeptical when we started seeing this signal.

18:37But the power of genetics is in a way that the data will stare you in the face and force you to rethink your ideas if you're wrong.

18:44According to the genetics, interbreeding happened in the Middle East.

18:57Around 55,000 years ago, modern humans were expanding north out of Africa.

19:03At the same time, the Neanderthals were being pushed south by a cold spell in Europe.

19:14The two types of human were destined to meet.

19:22And here, they mated and interbred.

19:25The genetic evidence undermines the traditional view of Europe's first peoples.

19:43If they bred with each other, the two types of human cannot have been so very different.

19:49For a century and a half, scientists have been picking over the evidence in Europe,

19:57trying to understand why Neanderthals seem so separate from us.

20:01They assumed that modern humans are just superior to Neanderthals,

20:05and so there'd be no chance of them interacting with each other in any meaningful way.

20:09Now genetics is showing us that that's wrong,

20:12that these two types of humans interbred with each other.

20:15That may change everything.

20:16We've got to find a way to fit Neanderthals into this story.

20:21They're like cards from a different pack.

20:23Similar, but different.

20:25The problem is, if we try to put them in this structure,

20:30the whole thing may come tumbling down.

20:31To me, as an anthropologist, that's what it feels like at the moment.

20:47The old story has collapsed, and we've got to begin to tell a new story about Neanderthals and modern humans.

20:52A story about interaction.

20:53The new story starts here, in southern France, with a remarkable discovery which suggests modern humans were in Europe far earlier than anyone thought.

21:10This is Mandrin cave.

21:11This is Mandrin cave.

21:26Archaeologist Ludovic Slimac has been excavating here for 10 years.

21:31Mandrin cave was discovered recently, and has exceptional preservation.

21:39Modern archaeological methods, developed here, give us a very precise picture of the lives of the different human groups who came to Mandrin cave.

21:49As his team excavated, they uncovered a mass of artifacts, in sediment that's 50,000 years old.

22:08Below the grey layer, in the middle there, you can see a kind of yellow sand.

22:13And this layer has revealed something surprising, which we've never seen in Europe before.

22:24In this one layer, were more than a thousand tiny shards of flint.

22:30This one is a perfect triangle.

22:40It's just a centimeter long.

22:45And this point has a fracture, which, I think, must have been caused by its use as a weapon.

22:52We know blades like this exist in traditional tribes today, but they're always propelled by a bow, which would mean that these are arrowheads.

23:09The bow and arrow is a weapon associated only with modern humans.

23:14Does this mean they were in France 50,000 years ago?

23:2110,000 years before we find them in Romania?

23:31Slimak has to be sure the objects really are arrowheads.

23:36So he sets about replicating them.

23:38The sort of point found at Mondrian requires a very high level of skill and lots of experience to make.

23:49It's not about hitting a rock against a rock.

23:53It's about becoming in tune with that rock.

23:55There would have been only a few great craftsmen who would have been able to make them.

24:12We're going to chip off some small pieces to give the block a perfect triangular shape.

24:17We can then make, in one go, a point that's identical to the ones found in Mandarin Cave.

24:23To complete the test, he needs to fire the arrowheads and see if they fracture in the same way as the points from the cave.

24:51That requires an expert archer and a suitable prey.

25:21What kind ofcribe the bowed with her?

25:24You want to get back to the head, then your arms or fingers pushed out the bow.

25:25First, on the left, you go towards the instrument, follow the thumb.

25:29Yeah.

25:30Oh, oh.

25:32And it's inside the other way you've got to push it.

25:36Yeah.

25:37There, I'll wait.

25:38Wait, I'll wait.

25:40Right.

25:41There, there.

25:42That's perfect.

25:44It's like this.

25:45We have a 2mm length of 2mm.

25:47Fracture in plumes.

25:48Yeah, it's good.

25:49It's a good one.

25:50one. That's really nice. This is exactly the kind of fracture we have in our

25:56architecture. This is really the signature of bow and

25:59the road technology. It's fantastic. Since modern humans were the ones making

26:06arrowheads, Slymak believes they must have been here 50,000 years ago.

26:14Today, the Rhône is a major highway. Boats, trains and cars use it to get from the

26:24Mediterranean to the north. This highway must have been the same in the past. You can

26:33imagine seeing big herds of horses and bison coming up from the Mediterranean.

26:38They must have been a great resource for the hunters who were in this

26:46population 50,000 years ago.

26:53But modern humans were not the only people using this hunting ground. What's

27:01intriguing is the arrowheads were found in a layer sandwiched between other layers

27:07of artefacts made by Neanderthals.

27:16Based on fragments of soot in the same sediment, the gap between these layers

27:22was incredibly small.

27:25Analyzing this soot deposit, we can see the time between two occupations at

27:31Mondrian cave. And therefore we know that between the people who made Neanderthal

27:39tools in this cave, and the people who made the bow and arrows, it was only a very short time.

27:48Maybe one season, maybe two.

27:51The picture that emerges is of modern humans in the Rhone Valley, 50,000 years ago.

28:06They show up here before anywhere else in Europe.

28:10They were using bow and arrows to hunt their prey.

28:13But they didn't stay long.

28:18For some reason, they moved on, not to return for thousands of years.

28:27And within months, or just weeks, the Neanderthals moved back in.

28:32There's no sign of confrontation.

28:38It's as if the two types of human were moving in and out of each other's territory as equals.

28:53Neanderthals may not have made arrowheads.

28:56But at exactly the same time, they were making tools just as ingenious

29:00as those made by modern humans.

29:07300 miles from the Rhone, at Abri Peroni Rock Shelter,

29:12archaeologist Shannon McFerrin has excavated part of a bone.

29:21It's a small fragment of rib with this curved, polished tip

29:28that I think is the broken end of a bone tool.

29:32When we look at this in a microscope, we see small grooves, small striations,

29:38that show the direction of use, that show that it was getting rubbed up against something.

29:42As McFerrin wondered what these bone tools were for,

29:55he realized leather workers today use something similar.

30:01Delphine Viau is a saddle maker, working in a traditional way.

30:05She immediately recognizes the tool.

30:14They are lisoirs. This one is smaller, but it's the same thing.

30:22So you're using the edges of the tool?

30:23Yes. You close all the pores of the skin, which makes it waterproof.

30:32Now it's closed. You can also imagine, if you use oil on it, it will penetrate really deeply.

30:42Why use bone and not wood?

30:44It can be done with wood or metal, but metal scratches easily.

30:52There is a risk that something could damage the leather,

30:55and wood wears out unlike bone, which is indestructible.

31:0350,000 years ago, this is what Neanderthals were doing.

31:08Using a rib bone as a lisoir to make their skins waterproof.

31:15A creative response to the wet, cold conditions of Ice Age Europe.

31:23It does show from the part of the Neanderthals an ability to solve a problem

31:28that let them prepare their hides better.

31:32What I find cool in this case is that we have something that bridges that 50,000 years between us and them.

31:40In this case, it's the same tool being used across all that time.

31:44It's the same tool being used across all that time.

31:51João Zelão thinks Neanderthals had talents that went beyond tool making.

31:59They also had an aesthetic sense.

32:02They were capable of symbolic thought.

32:07Using shells to mix up natural pigments.

32:10There are several possibilities to explain this.

32:15One is that they painted the shell.

32:18They wanted it to be a different color from the original.

32:21The other is that they were using the shell as a container for something like body painting or makeup.

32:27In societies that lack identity cards or passports, body painting and personal ornamentation

32:38transmit information about who you are.

32:41It's a way of conveying a message about themselves.

32:45Which tribe you belong to, whether you're out to participate in hunting.

32:53In a way, you can say that this is modern behavior.

32:56And since we have documented it among the Neanderthals,

33:00the conclusion is that Neanderthals were more than two.

33:02that would be my conclusion.

33:15What else were the Neanderthals capable of?

33:34Just how similar to us were they?

33:39Jean-Jacques Houblin is an expert on a layer of artefacts known as the Châtel Pironian from the early days of contact.

33:51This is a tooth of a fox that is pierced here.

33:58And we imagine very easily how this could be a part of a necklace or how it could be fixed on a piece of clothes, for example.

34:08And clearly this speaks to us because this is exactly the kind of technique that has been used by recent hunter-gatherers and even today.

34:19Archaeologists always thought of jewellery as the work of modern humans.

34:26But when they discovered the teeth of the people who made the artefacts, they were Neanderthals.

34:41The teeth from the Châtel Pironian layers are typical from what we find in Neanderthal dentition everywhere else.

34:52You can see here the difference between a Neanderthal upper incisor and a modern human upper incisor.

35:02There's a difference in size, there's also a difference in shape.

35:07In Neanderthals you have what we call a shovel shape of these tooth that you don't have at all in most modern humans.

35:16If Neanderthals were making some of the first necklaces in Europe, what does this say about them and their abilities?

35:31For decades, science has been asking itself the question of whether Neanderthals could or could not make these kinds of things as a clue to whether their cognition was like our own.

35:46It has become clear from the archaeological record that they could do these things.

35:53We know they could because they did do these things.

36:02It seems Neanderthals were not the dumb brutes of legend.

36:07Isolated in Europe for tens of thousands of years, they had developed their own culture.

36:14On a par with that of their modern human cousins.

36:19But all the while, modern humans continued pushing out of Africa, through the Middle East and into Europe.

36:32Change was coming.

36:34Within the Chattelperonian layer, archaeologists find a type of spear point made by Neanderthals, which looks incredibly similar to points made at the same time by modern humans.

36:52It's as if the Neanderthals were copying the design.

36:59They may never have met the people who made the originals.

37:05All they needed was to find a discarded spear and work out for themselves how to make it.

37:12It looks like they have produced the same kind of object, but with their own technology.

37:19So the final product looks very much the same.

37:22But the method to produce it is different.

37:25To copy a technology without an instruction manual is a sign of intelligence.

37:31But it also spelt the beginning of the end for the Neanderthals.

37:38They were now playing catch up.

37:41Their culture transformed by the presence of modern humans.

37:46Some have argued that Neanderthals invented this kind of objects independently from the modern humans.

37:58But it's kind of puzzling that they would do that just at the moment when modern humans moved into Europe.

38:08Something similar happened 400 years ago, when Europeans brought horses to North America.

38:16The native people realized how useful these animals were and learned to ride them without ever being taught by Europeans.

38:29The idea spread so quickly and so effectively that horses became central to the culture of Plains Indians.

38:39But no matter how good they were at adapting to a new culture, they couldn't keep up.

38:45Overwhelmed by the sheer number of Europeans moving onto their land.

38:52In prehistoric Europe, Neanderthals faced the same sort of fate.

39:02Overwhelmed by the spread of modern humans.

39:08At first Neanderthals and modern humans seemed to have been equal partners.

39:15They were sharing the landscape, they were sharing technology, and they were sharing genes.

39:20If you imagine that this deck of cards is modern humans, and this deck is Neanderthals, they're basically the same.

39:27But the Neanderthals have blue face cards, just a little bit different.

39:30If we mix them together, that's what was happening in the European landscape.

39:36And you look at the resulting blend of populations, you can see that there's a good mix.

39:41You've got a lot of ordinary cards, and a few of the blue cards.

39:45But then at some point the balance of power shifts.

39:49Neanderthals are stuck in Europe, but modern human populations are growing in Africa and Asia.

39:56And you get wave after wave of new populations coming into Europe.

40:02As they do, it's like mixing in more and more of these decks of cards.

40:07So what you end up seeing is that the population is almost uniformly modern humans, with just a little bit of Neanderthal.

40:22That means that the Neanderthals were swamped.

40:25They were absorbed into the modern human population, genetically, physiologically, and culturally.

40:36One of the key routes into Europe was via the Danube River.

40:42It flows from the Black Sea through Eastern Europe into modern-day Germany.

40:49A thousand miles upriver, it passes through the region of Swavia.

40:57In modern times, the river has changed course.

41:03But 40,000 years ago, this was the Danube Valley.

41:11It was home to a new wave of modern humans spreading through Europe.

41:18They lived in limestone caves, like this one, Hohlefels.

41:25For 17 years, archaeologist Nick Conard has been working here, directing excavations, exploring the human history of this cave.

41:42What's up, Jane? More little treasures?

41:48Have you been finding burnt bone or mainly charcoal?

41:51A few very small pieces.

41:53They find artifacts made by Neanderthals and modern humans, but never from the same date.

42:00There's a 2,000 year gap between the last Neanderthal and the first modern human.

42:12A fascinating question is, what happened when modern humans arrived?

42:15What was the situation?

42:16We would expect modern humans and Neanderthals to have met here.

42:19Interestingly, that's not the case.

42:21When we look at the deep deposits of Hohlefels, we can show that Neanderthals were living here for many thousands of years.

42:29But when modern humans arrived, the cave was empty.

42:32That raises the question, why was that the case?

42:35Why weren't Neanderthals visibly here on the landscape when modern humans arrived?

42:39Conard believes that by the time they were here in Swabia, the two types of human were on a different trajectory.

42:52Judging by the artifacts they made, modern humans had taken a quantum leap forward.

43:06The Venus of Hohlefels was made 35 to 40,000 years ago.

43:12It's the oldest sculpture of a human body found anywhere in the world.

43:25It's interesting to look at what is depicted and what's absent.

43:28What is most prominently absent is the head.

43:31There's no head at all.

43:32Instead of a head, there's a ring showing that it was used perhaps as an ornament or worn around the neck.

43:37What is present are the sexual characteristics.

43:40The pubic triangle and the vulva are very intensely cut out, showing that the genitalia and reproduction were important.

43:47The breast, enormous breast, oversized, also consistent with the idea of fertility and reproduction.

43:55You can imagine after spending months being holed up trying to survive the long cold winter.

44:05Then the spring comes.

44:10The grass comes up, the animals start to have something to eat.

44:14I mean, the joy we have at the end of the winter would be nothing compared to these people who have been hunkering down in a cave just trying to manage over those long months.

44:23The whole idea of the connectedness between people, human reproduction, animal reproduction.

44:46That all is what this figurine is about.

44:49In neighboring caves, archaeologists have found other figurines carved from mammoth ivory.

45:09Animals that populated the Ice Age landscape.

45:19They are some of the most exquisite art objects ever made.

45:24The crown jewels of European archaeology.

45:33One of the most intriguing figures is neither animal nor human, but both.

45:44Eleven inches tall, the lion man of Hollenstein-Stattel is thought to be some kind of religious icon.

45:53A shamanic totem.

45:58But he's not alone.

46:00A miniature version of the same figure was found at Hollefels, 30 miles away.

46:08The remarkable thing about the lion men is that we have two objects that, although they're very different size, are actually the same thing.

46:16Combinations of lions and humans being depicted in two different valleys.

46:23When you find a second one, it makes it very clear that this was part of their ideology, their system of beliefs.

46:30Showing that there was interaction between these people, that they existed in a social network.

46:35Were from the same culture, spoke the same language.

46:38Perhaps exchanging mates, economic ties.

46:43They lived adjacent to one another, but were in frequent contact with one another.

46:48Archeologists at Hollefels have also found a bone flute.

47:07Made 35,000 years ago, it's one of the oldest musical instruments in the world.

47:13The best bones to make flutes of are wing bones of big birds, for example vultures or eagles or swans.

47:24It's the same like our lower arm.

47:27And the first step to make a flute out of it is to cut off the joint ends with a flint tool.

47:32Wolf Hein is an expert in paleo reconstructions.

47:43He's worked out it would have taken prehistoric people four hours to make a bone flute.

47:49One may wonder why people spend so much effort on making a musical instrument at that time.

47:55And for me the answer is obvious.

47:58Music is the glue that keeps the society together.

48:01If you live for a long time in a small space with a lot of people there will be aggression, there will be social tension.

48:08And the best thing to keep these tensions away is making music.

48:12The question is, what did the flute sound like?

48:24Jimi Hendrix did it better, but this is my interpretation of the Star Spangled Banner just for you. Thank you.

48:40Once modern humans had opened a route through the Danube corridor, the population kept growing.

48:55Africa was like a pump, pushing more people into Europe.

49:04The central zone between the ice sheets and mountains was prime real estate.

49:09It became one of the most densely populated parts of the prehistoric world.

49:16A hub of social connections.

49:20Art was key to this expansion.

49:28Allowing people to share a culture of beliefs.

49:32To forge their own identity and mark themselves out as different.

49:39By contrast, there is no evidence from Swabia that Neanderthals made any complex art or music.

49:51Is that because they weren't capable of such things or didn't need them?

49:58There were fewer Neanderthals living in smaller groups that were less mobile.

50:04They never formed the social networks so key to modern humans in Europe.

50:12The number of people a Neanderthal interacted with over the course of his or her life would be perhaps dozens or scores of people.

50:22Modern humans could perhaps be many hundreds of people.

50:25Modern humans had an enormous wealth of objects, figurative objects, musical instruments, ornaments that they needed to identify each other, to communicate with each other.

50:37Neanderthals didn't need that, and when they encountered it, it was unfamiliar to them and they struggled with it.

50:44Since Neanderthals were discovered over 150 years ago, scientists have been trying to work out what happened to them.

50:58Why did they disappear?

51:03We used to think they were outsmarted by modern humans.

51:08But it's possible they were simply outnumbered.

51:12There would have been no great moment of extinction.

51:31Instead, they would have been gradually assimilated by us, modern humans.

51:41Neanderthal populations seemed to be extremely small, a few thousand people on a continental level.

51:51Modern humans, for some reason, were able to reproduce faster and more successfully than Neanderthals, perhaps also relying on culture more.

51:59But this would have made, in fact, all the difference.

52:03Neanderthals didn't really have a chance in the end.

52:08When Neanderthals ceased to exist as a separate species, two peoples became one.

52:21But Neanderthal genes live on, in our DNA.

52:26Once we lived in a world inhabited by all kinds of humans. Neanderthals, Denisovans, probably several different kinds in Africa.

52:36And now they're all gone. And we're the only ones that are left. We won the game.

52:49We were better at connecting, better at creating networks, better at living in larger groups.

53:04And those things all feed on each other. Once you're living in larger groups, you're making more connections. You have to become more creative. It's an exponential process.