The Infinite Monkey Cage - Neanderthals

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

The NeanderthalsBrian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by hominids Alan Davies, Neanderthal expert and author Rebecca Wragg Sykes, and paleontologist and woolly mammoth expert Tori Herridge and learn just how misunderstood our ancestors have been. The image of the lumbering, ape like, simple, grunting Neanderthal has been turned on its head with the discovery that we are far more related to Neanderthals then we ever thought possible. Nearly all Europeans will have around 2% Neanderthal DNA, and the revelation of widespread interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans has turned the idea of our exceptionalism on its head. It seems that what defines us may have defined the Neanderthals as well, and we are not so different after all. Producer: Alexandra Feachem

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince and this is the Infinite Hominid Cage. One of the things that I love about science is just the speed of change. Things are always changing, books go out

of date for instance. For instance my Jim Al-Khalili book of home alchemy is an absolute waste of time and led to a lot of burnt pans and I would also say my Jim Al-Khalili book of cold fusion was less than impressive where he just said all you needed were two cornettos a bag of oven chips and a swing ball set it didn't work um even even proper books by scientists that aren't just on the telly you know sometimes they go out of date thank you today we broaden the definition of the cage to include all hominids, because we'll be talking about Neanderthals, to whom we are all related. Except possibly me. Brian's related to them because he is the hairy one, but I'm related to whatever those ones on BBC4 documentaries, those little bald ones are. Was it homo floresiensis?

No, yet again I meant Jim Al-Khalili. Again, I meant Jim Al-Khalili. One of the great changes, of course, in our Neanderthal knowledge means that the Your Mama joke has changed. For instance, as many of you will know now, the traditional Your Mama joke is, Your Mama is so Neanderthal, which frankly came as a surprise to scientists in 2013. In today's show, we'll find out what many have imagined to be

our lumbering distant cousins were actually artists, inventors, scientists and lovers. The discovery that we share at least 2% of our DNA with our Neanderthal ancestors has revolutionised our understanding of our distant past. So today we ask, far from being inferior, were Neanderthals in fact our equals? And if so, why are we here whilst they're not? We're joined today by three people who dig for knowledge, two to understand life on earth and one to give it the necessary punchline

and they are? Hi I'm Rebecca Rag Sykes, I'm an archaeologist and the author of Kindred, a book about Neanderthals and the thing I would really like to know about Neanderthals is what did they have in their pocketses? We don't know how they carried stuff around it's basic but we have no idea i'm tori herridge i'm a paleo biologist and i'm based well right now i'm based at home but i'm normally based at the natural history museum in london and uh the thing i think the next big question we're going to have to ask about neanderthals is do we really know how far they've spread across the world? Are there places that we haven't found them yet? And I'm particularly interested in whether or not they could get to

islands. Hello, I'm Alan Davis. I'm a comedian, an actor and a regular panellist on QI and I've recently published my memoir, Just Ignore Him. And the thing that I would like to know about Neanderthals is, did they wear really big hats and will we ever find one and this is our panel rebecca when we were growing up i suppose neanderthal almost came became synonymous with um sort of a lumbering kind of you know something that was not particularly intelligent and so on. But how, given what we know now, how should we picture a Neanderthal? It's interesting because people are still quite happy to use Neanderthal as a slur.

Although really, for the past 30 years, I think the picture of Neanderthals has shifted. Even in, you know, popular culture, people quite aware and and sort of happy to say oh yeah Neanderthals they weren't as stupid as we used to think were they but the detail of Neanderthal life is the thing that really has not sort of filtered out so much and people perhaps do still see them as a bit backwards maybe not wearing some clothing that was quite nicely tailored unlike the the clever Homo sapiens after them. Whereas I think really what you should think of when you think of a Neanderthal in your mind is a hunter-gatherer, supremely well adapted to whichever environment they were in, whether it was cold or warm, like it is today.

And Tori, you're an expert on woolly mammoths, amongst other things. And I just wonder, where is the overlap then, in terms of the understanding of the mammoth and the understanding of Neanderthals? Where do we find that kind of that shaded area? Well, that's actually a really interesting point you make there, because in some ways, fossil elephants in general are a really wonderful parallel for human evolution. So elephants have been constant companions of humans since the get go. They've got the shared oranges in Africa. Pretty much every site with a fossil human in it has got a good chance of having an elephant in it too. Because elephants, they're a species, which now we've only got two African elephants,

two species of African elephant and one species of Asian elephant. We think of them as not being this global phenomenon. But if you only go back 100,000 years, you had elephants all over the world, apart from Antarctica and Australia different kinds of species different groups and they've all gone extinct in the same way that all other hominids have gone extinct and left us with just one us so for the woolly mammoth point of view understanding the history of the woolly mammoth is really really similar to understanding our history and Neanderthal history it's so many similar questions because they all relate to the same period of time and the same climatic changes that were faced by Neanderthals

and were faced by woolly mammoths and the woolly mammoth ancestors. There is the key question though, what did they taste like? That's, you know, delicious I think. I mean, is it the case that rather like in North America where there were vast herds of buffalo and humans would follow them around and live off them, really, do you think that was the case with... Were there very large herds of these animals?

If you get one, that's a lot of food and a lot of other raw materials. So you kind of attach yourself to them. I think... I mean, that's certainly definitely a quite likely scenario. I mean, humans are clever, Neanderthals were clever. Becky will go into that in more detail. But, I mean, a single I think, I mean, that's certainly definitely a quite likely scenario. I mean, humans are clever. Neanderthals were clever. Becky will go into that in more detail. But I mean, a single mammoth, I mean, if you think, so a woolly mammoth, one of the things you have to get your head around, first of all, is that a woolly mammoth is about the same size as an Asian elephant.

So it's not bigger than that. So it's the same size as an Asian elephant. But that's still really, really big. So let's say a medium-sized mammoth might weigh about three tonnes, just over three tonnes or something. That's about three and a half million million calories that's a lot of calories you could basically feed 800 hunter-gatherers for a day or a tribe for a month once you've got this thing where you've brought it down somehow you've erected a trap or dug a hole or got a really good

spear or however you've got it pushed it over a, then you can't really go anywhere, can you? It's three tonnes. You've then got to camp around it until you've used it all up. Or you can transport it. That's actually really, really interesting. One of the most fundamental things is going way back before Neanderthals, so I apologise, but it's really interesting that elephant carcasses, so ancient elephant carcasses and human stone tools

are really closely associated. And one of the questions that's come up again and again and again is could elephants in some way, or at least elephant corpses, again, the doorbell just rang, could elephants in some way or elephant corpses have acted as a focal point for humans coming together, a focal point, a place where you could start to form a social species because these are places where great like great accumulations of carnivals and scavengers can

assemble and not compete because it's a place of plenty there's enough for everyone you can have kind of positive interactions you could have friendships form you aren't sparring or fighting over resources by the way i should have mentioned for anyone listening, the doorbell was for repetition of elephant. But it was... Alan, were you one of those children who was fascinated in these ideas of woolly mammoths? Because I love those kind of books. I think so, yes.

And there are certain words that I think of as from childhood, like woolly mammoth. And another one is saber-tooth tiger the saber-tooth is it was a big part of 70s Essex everyone everyone knew about this everyone knew about the saber-tooth tiger we knew about nothing else from the past but we knew that there had been saber-tooth tigers but did you know that there were once scimitar tooth cats in Essex? Well, no, you see? And this is one of the problems with Essex,

is that we know almost nothing about ourselves. So, Alan, I'm a... We're fully confident to go on talking anyway. I'm from Essex. I knew there was a reason why I liked you. Yeah, I'm from Essex. And I did not know any of this growing up at all. I had no idea no

idea whatsoever and like a scimitar tooth is different from a saber tooth in what way it's slightly more so there's two so the typical saber tooth cat is what's called smilodon and that's the classic one that we mostly associate with north america um because there's loads i know it's great and that's probably really long things. There was another kind of... That's like a mafia character. Yeah. And then there was another type of sabre tooth or scimitar tooth because it was more serrated, had a serrated tooth and sort of chunkier. So less so long and sort of curvy, but sort of chunkier, but seriously poking down sort of with loads of serrated knives, like a steak knife all on the edges of it.

Belonged to a big cat called homotherium and yeah that was um present in britain i think about 500 000 years ago before them and um may have persisted later there's some really late surviving fossils from the north sea but they've got controversial dates on it but it's just amazing i didn't have any of this idea of this uh you know as you say hippos in britain it just wasn't anything that i knew about and essex hasn't got the most interesting geology but it's got a lot of ice age and i had no idea all those gravel pits from all we ever really talked about was we talked about bodicea or buddhica so she's now known and uh dick turpin that was basically

dick turpin supposedly had a hideout in Epping Forest and there was a nightclub at Waltham Abbey called Turpins. Where it's actually... Where people would often fashion simple blades. Not worth avoiding. I just love that idea. How shall we remember our history? Well, in Berkshire, we're using a series of blue plaques.

In Essex, a series of nightclubs. My favourite nightclub in Essex was one that was called Scenarios. Which... I don't know quite what that implies. Going down Scenarios. Rebecca, we've... Tori mentioned, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, about hundreds of thousands. Could you sketch out the time period that we're talking about when

we're talking about the Neanderthal era and the interaction with woolly mammoths and so on? What is that time period? Yeah, so Neanderthals, they are not some sort of missing link between us and our common ancestors with chimpanzees which were like six million years ago they are much closer in time to where we are so Neanderthals begin emerging in an anatomical sense somewhere between 400 and 350,000 years ago certainly we believe that that was happening in Europe and in fact our own species Homo sap, appear to be sort of emerging in a similar way in Africa at about the same time. So we sort of have these two parallel lineages that go forward in time. Neanderthals do their thing in Western Eurasia, and we do our thing in Africa. And there is some interaction over that span of time. And We know that because of the genetic interbreeding evidence.

But by 40,000 years ago, it appears that pretty much everywhere, that is the end of when we see Neanderthals, you know, in terms of the fossils, but also the archaeology that we associate with them. So that's when they disappear. Except, of course, they didn't disappear because they are still in us there

is a genetic legacy in most people alive today is it possible that they disappear because of a pandemic should they have been social distancing but they may have been too much social distancing i, that's one of the explanations for why they may have disappeared, that they were not actually as well connected in social network terms as Homo sapiens. But yeah, the question of disease is really interesting. I think a lot of people regarded it as a bit, oh, it's a bit fringe, you know, and we'll never know because most diseases leave no mark on the bones, which is usually what we have, unless we find a permafrost neanderthal but having lived through the past

you know few months of what's happened and seen okay we're a globalized world now but having seen sort of how one's world can be turned upside down by a novel pathogen. It does make me and I think other people sort of think perhaps that was something of what was happening and perhaps Denisovans because you know we don't know what happened to them either. Denisovans are another hominin group more in eastern Eurasia. Maybe they just had absolutely no defences and something like that was involved. It's an interesting picture isn't it of the world that you paint you mentioned the Denisovans as well so we see for hundreds of thousands of years a world where there are many hominin species around that it's not just homo sapiens. No what's

now is just weird this is not normal. And then that simplistic picture I suppose there's an idea in many people's minds in my mind I think as, that the Homo sapiens came out of Africa and just out-competed or eliminated in some sense all the other species. I get the sense from what you're saying that that is certainly over-simplistic and probably not the case. Yeah, I mean, what we know now, you know, the fact that Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago, that's kind of been known for a while, although the dates have been sort of shifted slightly. But it was assumed that the dispersal of Homo sapiens also happened about the same time. We kind of like surged out and just replaced Neanderthals. And the debate was, well, did we encounter them?

Was it our fault? Was there interbreeding? So we know there's interbreeding. Did we encounter them? Was it our fault? Was there interbreeding? So we know there's interbreeding, but what has changed is the span of time over which we now know that Homo sapiens were outside Africa is enormous. You know, we know people are in Australia by 65,000 years ago, in China, somewhere between 80 to 120,000 years, and in the Near East, 150,000, 180,000 years ago. So that's a huge amount of time over which they must have been encountering Neanderthals, and we see that genetically. We know that interbreeding was happening now and then, even before 200,000 years ago.

So the question is, if there was that contact over that huge amount of time, why did it take so long for Neanderthals to disappear, and also for us to actually get into Europe? Is it not the case also that it's not just Homo sapiens that are dispersing from Africa there's so many other species predators disease mosquitoes who knows what if the climate if the temperature goes up things can other things can spread can they not? Yeah I mean certainly over that span of time we're not looking at you know one ice age whatever it was multiple cycles of warming and cooling so as warm or warmer than

today and then going into ice ages and over that time you have to think of like slow motion waves of animals coming and going you know when it's warm two to four degrees warmer than now 122,000 years ago you've got hippos in Yorkshire they didn't just stampede there it's a slow process they went on EasyJet and they landed at Leeds Bradford that won't happen after Brexit

I guess well EasyJet have brought in a new fee, haven't they? You're not allowed now to carry on a hippo. You have to pay extra for it. It's ridiculous. Back in those days, they had much bigger seats. Still allowed armadillos, apparently. You can still get those on an EasyJet plane. I think that's a really, really...

The point Becky's making there is a really key thing that people have to first get their head around when they think about the world that the Neanderthals occupied, is that it isn't one world. It's many, many different worlds. And they persisted through it all. So, you know, if you think like 400,000 years ago, you get the first signs of Neanderthals. And at that point, the world was in a warm stage, which is just like today. And we talk about these, we talk about the ice age the general term it's not a very scientific term but really that just refers to a period of the time when there's permanent ice at the poles like today so we're still in an ice age and we're just in a warm stage within this ice age of the last two and a

half million years and for the last 800 000 years or so we've been governed by a roughly 100 000 year cycle between cold stages and warm stages like today and that's entirely dependent well not entirely but it's mostly driven by these great big orbital cycles of the way the earth moves around the sun and the way the earth tilts on its axis and the way the earth wobbles around that axis and they come together in these rhythms to create this 100,000 year cycle from cold to warm, from cold to warm. And so when we think of the Neanderthals as being an ice age animal or woolly mammoths as being an ice age mammal, it's not the full picture. We're actually talking about a time of changing climates,

of climates that went from very, very cold, where the ice could stretch all the way down, to the north of london in europe you know see it gets got to finchley road 450 000 years ago and then you've got periods of warm as becky says where it could actually be warmer than today so the last interglacial the last warm stage 125 000 years ago was maybe up to four degrees warmer than today and you know hippos in yorkshire hippos in the thames lions in the Thames you know it's it's it's these differences are extraordinary and Neanderthals persisted and did well through both cold and warm and that's really interesting for most of that time our species was in Africa. Rebecca I just wanted to ask you that before we move on to some specifics just painting this picture of the Neanderthal world? I mean, I know, as you've said,

it stretches over hundreds of thousands of years, so maybe it's a rather broad question, but I wonder whether you could just give a summary. You know, in your book, you paint this picture of a, you use the word there, a culture. I think you actually use the word a civilisation that spanned from Europe all the way through into Asia. So is it possible to paint a brief picture,

a snapshot of what that world may have been like for them in particular? Yeah, I mean, I think in the book, I said they're a bit like the Roman civilisation in that, you know, Rome was not one monolithic thing, because the Romans just, you know, amalgamated whoever was there. But in terms of their culture, around sort of 100,000 years ago in north france there seems to be a whole blade culture that pops up most of the time neanderthals are interested in using flakes and they have very sophisticated ways of getting flakes from rock and many different ways of doing it they're very um skilled nappers but one of the things that was claimed for a long time is that oh they didn't really go in for blades and so they're a bit stupid they definitely did make blades and there's this particular thing in in northern france that

they seem to just suddenly start doing it a lot it becomes part of their normal repertoire of tools and then it goes away again there's another cold stage another glacial that happens from about 80 000 years ago and after that point that sort of weird blade culture is gone and so is that because it was extinct or you know did those groups actually disappear or did they just change what they were doing but it's a really great example that there is diversity and through time and also we see it regionally like Neanderthals in Eastern Europe had one way of making hand axes two-sided tools Neanderthals in Western Europe, it was a totally different thing. It's like, no, you do it like this.

No, no, you do it like this. When you say flakes, you don't mean... The chocolatey kind. Because I've had that in my head for the last... You mean bits of stone. Yeah, but you know what? You can actually nap chocolate. It fractures quite a lot like stone.

If you have a nice block of dairy milk and you sort of give it a whack, you can see the little sort of the landmarks that we use to identify stone tools. They're kind of similar. Alan, do you find that is one of the problems where I was just thinking about that? Because as comedians, you're listening and you're going, I'm enjoying this, and then you hear the potential for a joke and you go, I can't hear anything else now. No, that's it.

It's just ruined. It's like kind of... Or images, like the moment that Torrey said Finchley Road, all I heard was there'll be delays on the Jubilee line for the next 5,000 years due to the Ice Age. And I'm trying to listen to the information, but my brain's going you're not one of those people who understands you just it's an it's an absolute

chronic affliction it's two afflictions it's one having the thought and then it's the desperate need to voice it that's why comedians are such an irritant on serious serious academic discussion but now everybody's net her learned that you can actually nap chocolate. That's a serious survival skill. I would never, until now, really, I've never met someone who's so confident with the verb to nap without it meaning putting your feet up. Yeah, nap with a K.

Nap with a K. It just means breaking something. It means to make stone tools, yeah. It's the action of producing stone artifacts yeah i'm just going to say this is a perfect example the problem for the scientist in a discussion with comedians is to know when to stop the hilarity because i i know i you break the comedic flow and they look at you they look at you with a very annoyed expression on their face but i have a joke I've been saving this up for 20 minutes

while you people talked about precision and science. That's exactly the problem we have on QI. Sometimes in comedy, it can take quite a lot of waffle before the, you know, it's a bit like panning for something in a river. And you need to, you do need that time. But this is different, this is a more interesting sciencey show, so I have to think, it better be pithy and quick or you're just not going to get the time.

You're not going to get a run-up. So can you tell me, tell me when I'm allowed to ask Tori a scientific question. You wait a minute. I'm going to have a little chat with Alan and then we'll come back. Okay. Tori, we've talked about um in some detail and i i want to ask you as well rebecca um but first sorry the what we find this we reconstruct this history quite detailed history as you said

we know the hippos in the thames and also talk with some confidence about species that are now extinct so could you give an overview of how, what evidence we have and how we begin to build up this picture? The great thing about working on the Ice Age is you've got an enormous record of material, like we've got loads and loads and loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of fossils. Fossils of big things, but also fossils of tiny things like, you know, tiny shells of beetles and snails, and they give this really complex picture of the environment for this time period. And we've still got a lot of it surviving.

So it's not like, say, working on a time period from several hundred million years ago, where there's only a few places on Earth left, which has got the rock record from that time period to work on. There's quaternary, there's ISH period deposits all over the place. So we've got a massive, a massive amount of data, more than we could ever deal with. And then we can use basic techniques like stratigraphy, which is just the simple premise that if you can properly dig an area and be sure which layer is on top of which layer,

which isn't always as easy as you think in a cave, for example, if you can be sure of that, you can be fairly confident that the stuff at the bottom is older than the stuff above it. So you can get sequence of events at least least and then becomes the absolute timing of events and that's when you get to dating and that's when it can get a bit tricky because to put absolute numbers on things rather than just correlating one area with another area with another area with another area means you've got to use different types of techniques and that depends on what you've got available to you and there are methods of varying precision and there are methods of varying accuracy and if you can do lots of different methods

then you feel quite confident about it so if you're working in caves one of the best things you can use is a method of radioactive decay dating again but using a different isotope or two different isotopes uranium thorium and you can use that to date the time at which say um salactite or salagmite was formed and that's got a great accuracy you can get really high precision on that between like you know you can date something 300 000 years ago within a few years sometimes you know which is amazing um and so that's that's brilliant you can do that all the way back to about 300 maybe sometimes 360 do you do that on the site or do you have to take the thing to take it away yes you have to go to you have to take take samples of the stalagmite or stalactite we call it a speleotherm is more general term it

captures all the different kinds of calcite flowstone drapery that you might see in an amazing sort of stalactite cave and you take a sample away and then you have to basically put it through a mass spectrometer to work out all the ratios of the various isotopes it's really fascinating but as before i've been trying i know that there's a joke in calcite flowstone and i don't know what it is but i think it's something to do with a very expensive kitchen worktop see that's what i'm now trying to play the game of guessing which word has stopped you hearing everything else because i thought it was drapery i thought drapery was going to get you so that's um came after calcite flow i think i think it sounds like an emerson lake and palmer album

calcite flow stuff can you tell from the skeletons that exist whether Neanderthals are stronger than humans? I mean, if it kicked off. That's a great question, Rebecca, because, again, in your book, you talk in great detail about the anatomy and the strength and the physical stature of Neanderthals and even the internal sort of structure of a Neanderthal. So that answering Alan's question, but also the question, how do we know just from bones?

Yeah, I think people, you know, when we talk about human evolution, people maybe have an idea that we just sort of got a few scraps here and there. But actually for Neanderthals, first of all, we found them first. They were the first hominin that we ever realised existed over 160 years ago. But we also have got enormous amounts of skeletal material for them. We have thousands of pieces. Probably overall, all these little bits represent something like 200 individual neanderthals some are more complete than others some of them we're talking just like oh there's a skull or a jaw in one cave and that's

one individual but we also actually have a lot of very um nearly complete or partially complete skeletons and it's enough that we can reconstruct the entire body in great detail simply from the bones. And we also have individuals ranging from right across the ages. So we have tiny, tiny little fragile newborn baby skeletons, which are very complete, which is interesting in itself. Why are they so complete when they're fragile? And we have it right through children, you know, toddlers, school age, teenagers who do look a bit awkwardly adolescent.

You know, they sort of look a bit growth spurty. And then you've got adults and even, you know, what we call elders, which are over 40. But yeah, I mean, for hunter gatherers, if you get to 50, 60, you're doing pretty well. But we do have that for Neanderthals too so we have the full range of of their lifespan um and yeah from just just from their bones we can see that they were a bit shorter than us um the body proportions are a bit different they're sort of a bit more um rounded and squat and that may be something to do with uh adaptation to colder climates because it's better to be sort of more like a round ball than something stretched out because it helps you keep your heat but the other

aspects of their body we can see for example the intensity of the bone's development that it's thicker and also the muscle attachment sort of markings on the bone we can see clearly that even as children Neanderthals were very active, they were living intensive lifestyles. And they, you know, by the time they're sort of teenagers and adults, they would have been very strong. Probably, I mean, I wouldn't want to, you know, have an arm wrestling match with one of them, for sure. But at the same time, they are, they're not sort of just hulking brutes and we can see that they had the ability and we see this from the archaeology as well but we can see it in their hands that they

could um they could use their fingers for fine dexterous things you know so they weren't sort of you know just lumps walking around and they were just as as full of physical prowess as modern athletes and certainly some of the levels of activity that are implied do match you know olympic level athletes in terms of the amount of physical activity that we see from the skeletons can i just ask you about this one particular remain you talk about in in kindred which is shanadar one i don't know if i'm pronouncing that correctly this incredible where you basically described the remains of something that had a Neanderthal who'd had arm crushed some form of amputation which actually looks like someone else did the amputation for them bad hearing all manner of infections and

had survived and this this seems to be you know two different things one the possibility of having the ability to remove a damaged limb and and survive to the idea that this Neanderthal would continue to be part of the tribe someone who had been you know this idea of empathy I mean it seems that there's a lot of different stories in in this particular uh yeah he's fascinating I mean he's like the unluckiest Neanderthal in the world he wrote the stuff that happened to him i can feel the cartoon film emerging yeah i mean overall if we look at neanderthal bodies a lot of them had some health complaint or you know an injury but not all of them and not to levels that were

more extreme than we might see in comparable hunting and gathering peoples, because it's hard to be a hunter-gatherer. You know, you can just fall over a lot chasing animals, break a leg. We do see this in Neanderthals as well. But this particular one from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, yeah, he dealt with an awful lot. He had some kind of terrible injury that crushed his side, including his face. He may have sort of lost sight and an eye and loads of different stuff. But he did carry on living. We don't really know how he lost the arm. It could have been cut off. It healed

over basically. But you know, the question with him is is, what level of care does it require to survive that? Because certainly he would have been out of action for a considerable time. And, you know, whether or not you might argue for sort of careful bedside nursing or not, certainly somebody had to have been bringing him food. He would not have been fit to go on, you know, intensive hunting expeditions anymore. Might it have happened when he was a child it happened in his youth yes and then he continued onwards um and he lived long enough to get you know just normal arthritis he was certainly continuing as a member of the group

we can see from the leg development that he was carrying on walking around and doing stuff probably had a limp but he was was not a member of the group that sort of was just cast aside and then, you know, died. He continued to be part of that community that he was in. So that speaks to what we see from all of the other archaeological evidence of Neanderthals, that their society was actually based around sharing of resources. It's a whole system about sharing and collaboration and cooperation. Coming back to Shenandoah 1, that's my favourite Neanderthal, I think.

And that's because I credit Shenandoah 1 really as being the moment at which I realised that the Ice Age was something that was interesting and fascinating and could be connected to human stories. And that's because I read a book as a teenager, as a young teenager, called The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Owl, which a number of people may have read. And that is basically the story of the Neanderthals that came from Shenadar Cave. And Shenadar 1 is a character in that. But I didn't know that. He was just a character I read.

But then I was kind of, this is interesting. And I and i went you know i bought it at pizzi market and i read this book which is really fascinating and then i went shopping in basildon the next week and i saw in a bookshop a book on ice age art and i bought that um because it was remaindered and i opened it up and there was shanadar cave like this and it was like the things in this book were real it was the same map and the at the front of the clan of the cave bear is here and i realized and there was Shanadar Cave. It was like the things in this book were real. It was the same map at the front of the Clan of the Cave Bearers here. And I realised, and I looked at the skirt and I was like, oh my God, it's Krem!

It's the one-eyed, limping, one-armed Neanderthal. And that was it, you know, that was it. I wouldn't say it changed my opinion now, but it shaped my life. And that's why I've ended up where I am today studying the animals that i study today it took me down this route of the ice age in general and i'm an evolutionary biologist and so really what i do is i use the ice age to answer evolution questions and there are a lot more elephant skeletons than they are neanderthals and awful i wanted to just just um talk to you because you're in the fortunate position in your

field of having a the an intact mammoth. It's a very famous discovery. Many, many, many, many. Yeah. And so you have DNA from the mammoth and so on. Does that mean soft tissue as well? In that permafrost, the clues in the word perma, which has been frozen continuously since that time period, you don't just find the fossils as we do in, say, in Britain today.

You actually find intact carcasses of Ice Age animals. And there are a number of carcasses of woolly mammoths that have been found and incomplete with fur, with skin, with flesh, with internal organs. So I've held a mammoth liver. It's just like, wow. It's all bluffing. And that is, it's just mind blowing. What would that mean for your field, Rebecca, to have that kind of discovery? I think for me, you know, there's the genetics and all the biology and, you know, what do they have in their stomach and all of that cool stuff. But actually, like coming back to what I said at the very beginning, you know, what's my big question about Neanderthals? I said, oh, what did they have in their pockets?

And yeah, finding a Neanderthal, being able to see what they carried with them. What were they wearing? What was the stuff they had with them every day? How did they carry it? You know, did they have bags? Well, they must have had bags. What did it look like? What does it tell us about their command of hide working technology. Did they have textiles?

Because there is a hint just from recent discovery in a French cave that they may have had plant-based thread technology. They may have been making threads. The idea that we would have something that really not only speaks to an entire species, but to just that everyday experience and that lived life of one individual Neanderthal it would be absolutely incredible that would be the thing we'd be advised our society is that

little window when everybody had an oyster card and now no one has an oyster card Alan we've run out of time there's so much that we haven't covered in this. It really is such a rich area. But, Alan, hopefully there's been things you've learned that you've enjoyed.

But I wondered now, from that conversation we had earlier, what at the end of the show is the thing where you think, do you know what, I reckon there's ten minutes to stand up in that idea? Well, I think it is probably going to be the one whose arm fell off and his kind of limp i was still somehow going come on guys just give me a bit of mammoth come on and i mean what did he do to warrant a bit of meat then he must have been maybe he could sing a song or maybe he could do impressions. You must have had something. See, this is how you feel as a performer.

I've got no actual useful skills, but they want me around for something. As usual, we asked our audience a question as well. And today we asked them, which prehistoric animal would you most like to be related to and why? Alison MacDonald here said, a giant sloth, to prove that my lifestyle is absolutely the result of genetics. This, I think, is very sweet. This is from Glenn, who just says, Nicholas Parsons, so his wit and charm could live on in me. That's a beautiful kind of just-a-minute Jurassic Park crossover.

I like Bob Bennett's answer. He just said Keith Richards. Oh, here we go. There's always a version of this, and I'm glad someone's found a way. Martin would like it to be the Sabretooth Tiger because fangs can only get better. So, thank you very much to our fantastic guests, who were Tori Herridge, Rebecca Ragsides and Alan Davis.

Next week, we are looking at the science of food. This will mean that because we're doing the science of food, my Swiss rolls will be tax deductible for at least one week. And also, we have basically a line-up of people who people who as children were told, don't play with your food, and have now turned it into a career, in much the same way that Brian was told by his teachers, stop just staring out of the window, where's that going to get you? And it turns out, it's a job, it's definitely a job.

Thanks for listening, goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Done that nice again. A new podcast series from BBC Radio 4. In the first stage of a poltergeist haunting, the entity will confine itself to making noise, as if it's testing its victims. The Battersea Poltergeist.

My name's Shirley Hitchens. I'm 15 years old. I live with my mum, dad, brother, gran... ..and Donald. Subscribe to The Battersea Poltergeist on BBC Sounds.