New Discovery Proves Homo Sapien & Neanderthal Shared Culture

[00:00:00]Oh, check it out. Modern humans and Neanderthals sharing culture, not just location?

[00:00:06]Okay, I got to see the evidence for this.

[00:00:09]Dun dun dun. Oh my god, a paywall. Well, it's only $20, right? And I am a history junkie. Well, there it is. I paid the big bucks so you don't have to. So, let's check out this cave where humans and Neanderthals shared more than a campfire. Hi, my name is Dan and welcome to the Dunking.

[00:00:30]>> [music and singing] >> Now, before we get into this, I want to discuss two events I'm going to be speaking at in the near future. One is Contact at the Cabin at Lake Chelan, Washington, October 4th through 10th.

[00:00:43]Hosted by the Gramatica crew, these events are just a ton of fun. I mean, you're going to have Randall Carlson talking about floods in the Pacific Northwest or me babbling about the elongated skulls in the Pacific Northwest and the mythology that the Native Americans in the region held sacred. And then we're going to be partying and hanging out until well after the sun sets. And if you can't catch me in the Pacific Northwest, maybe you can catch me down in Austin, Texas, October 16th through 18th for the Quest for Ancient Civilizations conference.

[00:01:11]It's going to feature myself, Billy Carson, Randy Carlson, David Childress, and a whole bunch of other pyramid idiots of the highest order are going to be on stage pontificating on the nature of the largest of stones. Seriously, this is going to be epic. We're going to be at the same venue where they filmed Austin City Limits, ACL Live, and then Austin has Sixth Street, which if you don't know what that is, look it up cuz we are going to party. All right. You want to catch me at one of these, if not both. Now, on to your regularly scheduled program. Now, in case you weren't aware, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens are two different species of hominid or or homo, you could call them. Um, well, the Neanderthals were shorter and stockier than the Homo sapiens were or are. Um, and well, there's a lot of exaggerations that have been attached to this over the years.

[00:01:58]The most famous example being the old man of La Chapelle where Neanderthal remains were found in a cave near the French village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908. Now, this poor bastard lived to be old and since they didn't have gene therapy, he had all kinds of diseases that made him like this hunch shambling mess. And this colored our perception of Neanderthals back in the day. It still does today. I mean, pop culture generally considers Neanderthal to be like large British hunched over kind of shambling monkey things, right? But these exaggerations are just that.

[00:02:29]They're exaggerations.

[00:02:31]Neanderthals were stockier than we are, but they were also shorter. They had the larger brow ridge that pop culture associates with them. This is not taxonomy gone wild. These are real lumps. They had differently shaped skulls than ours, so much so that you could mistake theirs for artificially modified skulls if you didn't know any better. They had chests like linebackers on steroids and they hunted huge things like mammoths and aurochs and woolly rhinoceroses and bison. And but they also were into small game and they did use some sea resources as well. They used a lot of plant resources. They also used fire.

[00:03:08]They didn't just use fire to cook with.

[00:03:09]They actually used fire to change the color of ochre or to change the color of a stone.

[00:03:15]Um this is pretty well documented. They had stone tools and had ornamentation including shells, engravings on tools, feathers, beads, dyes. Some of them used boats and many of these things like those boats are argued to have been used by Neanderthal long before modern humans did. So, if they were the first on a scene doing a specific job, how did we displace them? Well, the short answer is we just did it better. We were able to feed a family with less food, you know, a couple of trout, a couple of squirrels, a couple of rabbits.

[00:03:45]>> Rabbit? You red meant to delete anything.

[00:03:48]>> We had larger social networks and this gave us a constant influx not only of new ideas but of new genetic information. And this was a big deal.

[00:03:55]The Neanderthals were actually kind of inbred in places and they rarely left their locales, their immediate locations, from what we can see in the record. The inability to succeed against competition in different regions seems to have also played a role.

[00:04:09]Specialization was the norm and the skills that the Neanderthals specialized in were best suited in colder environments. The tools used by Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were usually very different as well. And we can only speculate as to how much more successful these tools made Homo sapiens, but we can look at the Grotta di Fumane cave and the paper that was published in 2022. This is the earliest known incursion into Europe of modern humans.

[00:04:34]And well, they used some drastically different tools than the Neanderthals that were using the same cave from before. Known as Neronean, this style of tools is smaller and finer than the previous owners' tools, the Neanderthal.

[00:04:47]And the Neanderthal made their stone tools in an entirely different manner, which is apparent in the record and is called Mousterian.

[00:04:54]Now, when modern humans came into the Grotta di Fumane cave, we had different weapons than the Neanderthals that used to live there. The difference in our tool kits was as apparent as the difference in our bodies, but this actually took a long time to get recognized. Mostly because the excavations that were done at the Grotta di Fumane cave were con- done in the late 19th and early 20th century. And because of that, stratigraphy wasn't very important and they didn't really pay attention to what came when. It was just like, "What have we got that's cool here?"

[00:05:22]And it ended up being a very long time before they were able to recognize that there was actually a different style of tool making here. They were just calling it evolved Mousterian before instead of Neronean. Because archaeology is totally a science and the opinions of archaeologists are infallible. Anyway, they recognized the difference in the tool kits eventually and well, they could tell that the different types of homos had different types of styles. And this difference is what allowed us modernites to specialize with our tool kits, our thinking, and communities instead of just our bodies. We would make projectile points to order and arm a bunch of hunters with these optimized weapons. And we would use these tools and to plan to attack larger critters and take them out with limited casualties.

[00:06:06]And there was one other thing that we like to do that really made it tough for the Neanderthals to keep up. We like to bone.

[00:06:13]>> The computer SENTENCES ANNA TO DEATH BY SNOO SNOO.

[00:06:19]>> YEAH.

[00:06:20]>> EXCUSE ME, WE like to snoo snoo. Now, DNA evidence has confirmed what Clan of the Cave Bear, Dungeons and Dragons, and Tanya's Island have been telling us for a long, long time.

[00:06:31]Humans and Neanderthal interbred. The oldest known evidence for this goes back 140,000 years. And even today they say between 2 and 6% of our DNA comes from these cavemen.

[00:06:42]And there are a number of mysterious aspects to this. One of them is the sex bias. Most of the genetic exchange between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens was from Neanderthal males to Homo sapien females.

[00:06:54]And there could be a number of reasons for this. Maybe the women like men with no chins. Maybe they liked them shorter back then. Maybe the guys that were in the Neanderthal camp had the kicking ass Fred Flintstone mobiles and that the Homo sapiens still hadn't figured those ones out yet. There's a number of reasons that this could actually be.

[00:07:12]But what we can say with a you know, it's not a certainty, but Neanderthal were solely bred out. So, it seems more like this was a degree of selection bias involved in this. That this was more this this admixture was coming to be more of um more of a Romeo and Juliet and less of an island boy adventure, if you catch my drift. God, dancing around that shit's tricky. And that brings us to this new paper because the findings at the Üçağızlı 2 Cave, totally pronouncing that right, in Turkey is pretty impressive and it does imply that not only was this a partnership and a idea, you know, a sharing of of um genetic material, but also of ideas and of culture and of memes. And for those of you who don't know what memes are, I mean, I know you know what memes are, but uh before the internet, um Richard Dawkins had spoke about memes and the idea was it's a an combination of gene and memory. And so, it's like this idea that gets passed from mind to mind and it succeeds or fails based on whatever. So, like happy birthday's a meme. Um you know, uh algebra's a meme, uh language is a meme.

[00:08:24]There's all these different things that that they can be beneficial, they can be harmful, they can be benign, but basically it's an idea that passes from one brain to the next kind of like a germ or a virus would, right? So, having said that, these guys were sharing this as well and I don't mean the Neanderthal child above. So, now now that we're up to speed on that, let's continue. Because in this cave we see almost the opposite of what we saw in the Grotte Mandrin Cave. We do not see an immediate change in tools. The Neanderthal and Homo sapiens used the same style of tools with slow innovations being continued throughout the occupation of the cave by both species.

[00:09:02]You see, the Neanderthal occupied the cave from 77 to 59,000 years ago and the real homos didn't move in till about 59,000 years ago.

[00:09:11]According to the scant records we have of actual hominid remains, unlike the Grotte Mandrin Cave or the Tim Shea Met Cave, which we will discuss shortly, the Üçağızlı 2 Cave has no burials in it. It does have some teeth and a mandible and thankfully that gives us some ideas as to what species inhabited the cave at what times. The papers authors divide the excavation into three layers, B3, B2, and B1. B3 and B2 are the older layers and they're Neanderthal layers. B 1 is the Homo Sapien layer and the dividing line between B1 and B2 is where the two species would have coexisted for a brief time.

[00:09:48]And what we see is the same type of flint [snorts] knapping used in the same tools made over thousands of years with a slow transition. Both tools and projectile points show similarities between all three layers in the fact that they have inscriptions on them and that they are basically designed to do the same job. The similar style of projectile point is present in both the oldest and the newest layers showing use by both species.

[00:10:13]And the utilization of cores which were then shaped into specialty tools is something also seen in all three layers.

[00:10:19]Almost 20,000 lithic specimens, that's stones modified by humans in archaeology speak, were recovered from the site. So this isn't guesswork. They're they're pretty certain that, you know, this use of stone tools didn't really change when the area became gentrified. And most of these stone tools were made OF FLINT.

[00:10:38]>> NO! GOD, PLEASE, NO! NO!

[00:10:41]>> AND some were made of burnt flint.

[00:10:43]>> Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire.

[00:10:47]>> The artifacts had similar retouching, that is like re-sharpening or re-purposing of the tool, done to them over 20,000 years of the cave's occupation. Inscriptions were also common and similar throughout the same period and this is really important to note. While there were some changes to the tools over time, there were aesthetic similarities that had no apparent function and these remained unchanged for millennia.

[00:11:11]The change from Mousterian to Neronian was present and this innovation did seem to follow the species change, which means the Neronian toolmakers were almost clearly Homo Sapien. But the other drastic changes that we normally see in these types of things are not present here. There is no change in tool types or distribution or type of stone used or where it was sourced from or even the size of the tools themselves.

[00:11:36]The manufacturing technique, the flint knapping, changed slightly, but the end result was almost identical both in appearance and function, which leads us to the foodstuffs used by the inhabitants of the cave. About 25,000 specimens of different animals that we ate were found there from mollusks to woolly rhinos and different pieces like that.

[00:11:56]And the thing that's really interesting that again shows a shared culture and in this case a weird one is fire was almost never used to prepare the food by any of the inhabitants of this cave over 20,000 years.

[00:12:08]I mean, that's a weird thing to share in your culture, but I guess sushi's a thing, so what do I know? The specimens show a preference for the larger game's limb and the entire skulls of some deer.

[00:12:19]Now, horns are almost entirely absent from the specimens recovered, which really makes sense if we extrapolate from what we know. The horns would be used for all different kinds of things from making cups with to putting on clothing to like you're grinding up and eating for like a ancient form of blue chews, which could explain why there was such an exchange of genetic information between a Neanderthal and the Homo sapiens.

[00:12:41]But but all kidding aside, at least for the next couple of minutes or two, um we really don't see a change in the way that the foods are used or eaten or prepared in this cave when the species change. They just keep right on trucking the same old [ __ ] And as I mentioned earlier, we know which species occupied the caves at different points in the past thanks to the teeth and partial jaw.

[00:13:05]And these were left behind by the previous occupants and they allow us to not only date the occupation layers in the cave, but compare the differences with other regions. It is an important question to ask. I mean, whether other areas where Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were all buddy-buddy. And that's something we will visit before the end of this video, but before we do that, I think it's important to mention there's one other really weird shared between these two cultures. They both kind of collected the same Pokémans. All right, they weren't really Pokémon, but they were close to this ammonite thing here, at least his shell anyway.

[00:13:38]Columbella rustica, perfect pronunciation once again. It's a type of sea snail that's not good for eating, and its shells are used and have been used for a very long time for ornamentation.

[00:13:50]And they find a bunch of them in all three layers. Not only do they find them in all three layers, they find them with similar amounts of wear and similar locations, the highest point broken off, like it's being used or rubbed or worn or something. One of those shells was actually heat treated, and it had changed its colors. Whether or not this was 100% intentional is not known, but that happened in B2, in the Neanderthal layer. Other species of non-edible mollusk shells were present, but the majority were the same species and seemed to have been treated the same manner. For 20,000 years, sapiens sold seashells by the seashore, or maybe they traded them for food or horns or snoo snoo. Seriously, the shells do offer a lot of possibilities. Some form of ornamentation seems most likely, but trade is also a possibility, these acting as some sort of proto-money. I mean, of expediting exchange that naturally crops up when trade happens.

[00:14:42]The think stones of Jordan in Diablo II, for those of you who are old-time gamers like myself. But even the paper's authors admit this is weird. It's like 20,000 years of stasis happened in this cave. They didn't really change their culture very much from what we can tell uh compared to other places in the world, and this is really, really strange. And so, you know, if we look to other caves, like I started with, with the Grotte Mandrin cave, we see that this isn't the norm. But are there other caves that show similar examples of this? And we find that actually is the case. In Timişoara Cave, we see evidence for three different hominid species.

[00:15:19]Neanderthal, Homo sapien, and a primitive pre-Neanderthal species all coexisting at different times over the course of 50,000 years. And just like the Ukazala 2 cave, we see cultural practices that supersede biology. The people are all buried on their right side in a fetal position, no matter age or species. We don't have big changes to anything we find that corresponds with the species change. The hunting, tool making, and odd objects collected over 50,000 years stayed the same. With those funerary practices being especially intriguing to me. I mean, they also used a lot of ochre, which is something I didn't really get into yet because it's so ubiquitous in the ancient world, but we see it here, and we saw it in the other cave, too. Um ochre was heavily used in in the Tun Te Mum Te Mum cave, it was actually heat treated at one point to change the color.

[00:16:11]Um it was heavily used not only in funerary practices, but you'll find it in the grooves of shells and whatnot in the place. And you see the similar types of things that we saw at the other cave with inscriptions. It very, very similar stuff, but different where it was a different culture, but a similar a similar idea as far as they weren't just warring because one had a different shaped skull than the other. Now, this gives us a small example, but I bet if we kept looking, we'd find more things.

[00:16:39]And it's one of the most fun places to speculate out of all the stuff that I've covered.

[00:16:45]I mean, again, you're in the Clan of the Cave Bear universe. Hope not, but Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, you got different species of of human talking to each other, demi-human, whatever you want to call it.

[00:16:56]Um communicating with each other, and you know, we know this happened for a very long time. And what's amazing about this to me, um you know, I talk about this kind of stuff a lot about how it's important to the different, you know, dreamers and skeptics work together. And side by side, we're more powerful than if either one of us is on our own. And you can just imagine these conversations happening between intelligent people on both species, and they're they're talking about things that seem almost insane to the other person because it's outside of their purview, but they're able to communicate just enough that they can communicate these complicated insane ideas to each other and open both both species up to, you know, more. And eventually we know who won, right? I mean, look at me. I'm totally not part part caveman. But at any rate, my point here is this is one of the most intriguing things when you really think about it because it really does kind of bears out what I preach about all the time. So to me, the psychology part of these things is always really important.

[00:17:59]And here's a great example of it. You could be our way or the highway, and I'm sure that plenty of people have been that way throughout history, but at least in these couple of caves for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, and these different tribes of homos were in there singing Kumbaya, buddy.

[00:18:18]And that you know, that really leads us to the point where we we don't know for sure what they were singing. Maybe one of them was subservient to the other, although we have no evidence for that.

[00:18:27]But what what we what we can say for certain is our history's complex. The evolution of humanity, the past of the human species is very complicated.

[00:18:38]There's a whole lot more to it than just a simple rubber stamp, and this is how it goes. Now, we like simple rubber stamps. We like to be able to just know a fact and this is how it is, but the reality of it is is it's just not that way.

[00:18:51]Um you know, we can really look back at these kinds of things and go, "I wonder how far back these memories go."

[00:18:59]Do we have when we write stories of giants, when we write stories of elves, or whatever, are we remembering times when we communicated with other species of hominids some somewhat loosely? Is that maybe somewhere in there?

[00:19:11]Maybe the idea that those three stars in Orion's Belt are some hunter in the sky.

[00:19:18]Maybe that predates Homo sapiens or wasn't created by Homo sapiens anyway. A lot of these things get really interesting and really intriguing.

[00:19:28]I don't know. To me the idea that some happy birthday song or some meme that's in my head running around could have come from a Neanderthal's brain originally is pretty [ __ ] cool.

[00:19:38]Anyway, thank you very much for watching. Again, I'm going to be in a couple of different places very soon. In October, you should come check it out.

[00:19:45]Both in Austin and in Lake Jackson. It's going to be great. Hope to see you guys there. Links to support the channel down below. Yeah, I spent $20 on this paper, but yeah, you know, I spent money. So, if you want to give me money to spend money on things like this, it would be tremendous.

[00:20:03]Got any change?