12 Prehistoric Civilizations That Left Behind Survivors We Never Knew About

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]All right, let's go.

[00:00:02]Number 12, the Pira of the Amazon. Deep in the Brazilian rainforest along the banks of the Mai River lives a tribe of fewer than 800 people whose existence challenges everything linguists thought they knew about human language. In 1977, missionary and linguist Daniel Everett arrived in the Piranha village intending to translate the Bible into their language. He stayed for over 30 years.

[00:00:29]He never finished the translation. What he found instead rewrote the boundaries of what human cognition was thought to require. The Piranha language has no numbers, not even words for one or two.

[00:00:44]It has no fixed color terms. It has no creation myths, no origin stories, no mythology of any kind. It has no past tense and no future tense. The piransa speak only of what is happening now or what has been directly witnessed by someone still living. Anything beyond living memory simply does not enter their language. Stories from grandparents who have died are not preserved. History as we understand it does not exist for them. But here's where the implications turn cosmic.

[00:01:20]Genetic and cultural analyses suggest the pira may represent a lineage that branched off from other human populations tens of thousands of years ago. Their isolation in the deep Amazon combined with linguistic features that have no known parallels among the roughly 7,000 languages on Earth suggests they could be the last surviving fragment of a pre-aggricultural cognitive world. A world where humans organized experience without abstraction, without recursion, without the mental architecture that allowed civilizations to build pyramids and write equations. The Pira have resisted assimilation for centuries.

[00:02:01]Portuguese colonizers, Brazilian rubber tappers, missionaries, anthropologists, and government officials have all tried to integrate them. None succeeded. They learn only enough Portuguese to trade, then forget it. They reject agriculture despite being surrounded by groups that practice it. They refuse the storage of food despite living in an environment of seasonal scarcity. Every offer of progress has been declined for generations. What makes their existence particularly unsettling is what it suggests about us. If the pira represents an older mode of human consciousness, one that predates the cognitive shifts that produced civilization, then the version of humanity reading this sentence is not the default. It is a recent variant.

[00:02:52]Something happened to most human populations roughly 10,000 years ago that did not happen to the pira. They are not primitive versions of us. They may be the original. We are the mutation. And the mutation has spread to nearly every corner of the planet, leaving fewer than 800 people on Earth who still experience reality the way humans did before the change began.

[00:03:19]Number 11, the survivors of Doggerland.

[00:03:23]Approximately 8,200 years ago, a massive underwater landslide off the coast of Norway sent a tsunami racing across the North Sea. The wave struck a vast low-lying landmass connecting what is now Britain to mainland Europe. Within hours, settlements that had existed for thousands of years were drowned. Within decades, rising sea levels finished what the tsunami began. The land sank beneath the waves. The people who lived there scattered or died. Their world was erased from the surface of the earth.

[00:03:59]This drowned country has a name now.

[00:04:02]Doggerland. For most of human prehistory, it was the most populated region in Northern Europe. Mesolithic hunter gatherers lived in its forests, fished in its rivers, hunted across its plains. Archaeological evidence pulled from the seabed by fishing trwers includes carved bone tools, human skull fragments, and the remains of entire ecosystems frozen 20 m below the surface of the modern North Sea. An entire civilization existed there for thousands of years and almost no one remembers that appear to descend directly from the messylithic peoples of Doggerland. The drowning was not total. Some survivors made it to higher ground. They mixed with the populations they encountered.

[00:05:00]Their lineage, fragmented and scattered, persisted through nearly 10,000 years of European history. Some coastal communities today carry the genetic memory of a country that no longer exists on any map. What makes this discovery particularly disturbing is what these populations may also carry.

[00:05:20]Folkloric traditions along the North Sea coast describe lost lands beneath the waves, stories of sunken kingdoms, drowned cities, ancestral homelands swallowed by the sea. For centuries, these were dismissed as mythology. The discovery of Doggerland suggests they may be something far older. They may be cultural memories transmitted across hundreds of generations, ancestral trauma encoded into folklore by a population that watched their world disappear and never fully recovered from the loss. The implications extend further. If a civilization that existed for thousands of years can be erased so completely that we only began to understand it in the last few decades, how many other prehistoric populations have vanished without leaving even folklore behind? Doggerland was preserved partly because its drowning was recent enough to leave physical evidence on a modern seabed.

[00:06:20]Older drownings from the much larger sea level rises at the end of the last ice age would have erased entire continental shelves of human habitation.

[00:06:29]Hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of coastline that supported human populations for tens of thousands of years now lie hundreds of meters underwater. Whatever those people built, whatever they knew, whatever they were, is gone. The only thing that remains is fragments of their DNA still circulating in populations who do not know where parts of their genome came from. Number 10, the Red Deer Cave. People of China.

[00:06:59]In 1989, miners working in a limestone cave near the village of Maludong in southwestern China discovered a partial human skull. The bones were strange.

[00:07:10]They did not match Homo sapiens. They did not match any known human species.

[00:07:16]The skull had a heavy brow ridge, a flat face, a thick cranial vault, and a brain case smaller than modern humans. It looked archaic. It looked like something that should not exist in the time period the cave deposit suggested. The dating returned a result that shocked the scientific community. The bones were only 11,500 years old. By that point in human history, modern homo sapiens had already developed agriculture. The younger dus had ended. Civilizations were beginning to form across the Middle East. And yet in southwestern China, something that looked like an archaic human relative was still alive, walking the same forests as modern humans, breathing the same air, possibly interbreeding with the populations that would become the ancestors of modern East Asians.

[00:08:09]The red deer cave people, as they came to be called, do not fit cleanly into any known category. Some researchers argue they are a previously unknown human species. Others suggest they represent a hybrid population, the result of crossbreeding between modern humans and an archaic group that had survived in isolated mountain regions for hundreds of thousands of years. A few have proposed they are descendants of homo erectus that survived in East Asia long after the species was thought to have vanished.

[00:08:43]The bones cannot answer the question.

[00:08:46]They are too fragmentary, too few, too compromised by time. What makes this discovery particularly unsettling is the timing. 11,500 years ago is not deep prehistory.

[00:09:00]It is roughly the same time as the founding of Gobeci in modern Turkey, the oldest known megalithic temple complex.

[00:09:08]While humans in the fertile crescent were carving 20 ton limestone pillars and inventing organized religion, an archaic human population was still surviving in the caves of southwestern China. Two completely different chapters of human existence were happening simultaneously.

[00:09:26]One was on its way to building the modern world. The other was about to vanish without leaving a name. The genetic evidence is more troubling still. Modern Han Chinese populations in southwestern China carry small fragments of DNA that do not match any known human group. They are not Denisovven. They are not Neanderthal. They are something else. Something that contributed genetic material to modern humans before disappearing from the historical record entirely. The Red Deer Cave people, or a population very much like them, may have interbred with the ancestors of hundreds of millions of people alive today. Their genes are still circulating in modern populations who have no idea their ancestry includes a human species that science has not yet fully identified.

[00:10:18]The e mathematics of human prehistory are starting to suggest something the early researchers did not anticipate.

[00:10:25]Humanity is not a single species that emerged in Africa and replaced everyone else. Humanity is a genetic patchwork stitched together from at least six known archaic lineages and possibly more we have not discovered yet. The ghosts of human species we never identified are walking around inside the cells of modern people. Most of them will never be named. They survived as DNA fragments in populations that do not know they are partially descended from species that science has not yet cataloged. Number nine, the hobbits of Palao. In 2008, anthropologist Lee Berger announced the discovery of smallbodied human remains in the limestone caves of the Rock Islands of Palao, a small archipelago in the Western Pacific. The bones described individuals who stood between 3 and 4 feet tall. They had small skulls, small teeth, and unusual facial features that did not match modern Pacific Islander populations. The remains dated to between 940 and 2,890 years ago, placing some of them within the historical period when written records were already being kept elsewhere on Earth. The discovery was almost immediately compared to the homop florosensis remains found four years earlier in Indonesia.

[00:11:54]Two separate populations of smallbodied humans, both isolated on Pacific islands, both surviving into recent prehistory. The implications were immediate and disturbing. Insular dwarfism, the evolutionary process by which large mammals shrink in size on isolated islands due to limited resources, may not have happened only once in the human lineage. It may have happened repeatedly. Wherever modern humans reached small islands and stayed long enough, the same biological pressures may have produced the same result. Smaller humans, different humans, populations that diverged from mainland homo sapiens until they became something distinct. The scientific community remains divided on whether the palow remains represent a genuinely distinct human population or merely a smallbodied variant of modern homo sapiens. The bones are not as archaic as the flora's hobbits. The skulls are smaller, but the proportions could fall within the range of modern human variation.

[00:12:57]Yet the consistency of the small body size across multiple individuals and the unusual cranial features have kept the debate alive for nearly two decades.

[00:13:08]What makes this discovery particularly unsettling is what it suggests about the Pacific. The islands of Micronia, Melanesia, and Polynesia are dotted with thousands of small land masses that were colonized by humans at various points over the last several thousand years.

[00:13:27]Many of these islands have been inhabited for hundreds of generations.

[00:13:31]If insular dwarfism can produce significantly smaller human populations within a few thousand years of isolation, then the Pacific may have hosted and may still host multiple distinct human variants that we have never identified. Most Pacific archaeology is in its infancy. Most island caves have never been excavated.

[00:13:53]Most genetic surveys of remote Pacific populations have never been conducted.

[00:13:58]Local mythology in Palo and surrounding islands describes small forest spirits and dwarf people who lived in the caves and forests before the modern population arrived. These stories have been dismissed as folklore for over a century. The discovery of physical remains matching the descriptions has forced researchers to reconsider. The legends may be cultural memory of actual encounters between modern homo sapiens settlers and pre-existing small-bodied populations. The dwarf people of Paloan myth may have been real and modern populations may have witnessed their final extinction within the last thousand years. The truly disturbing implication is the timeline. If small-bodied humans were still living in Palao 940 years ago, they were still alive when the Norman conquest of England occurred. While European chronicers were documenting the Battle of Hastings, a separate human population was quietly going extinct on a Pacific island. Their world ended without anyone in the literate civilizations of the time having any idea they had ever existed. How many other human variants vanished in the same period without leaving even bones behind? Number eight, the Andamines.

[00:15:17]In the Bay of Bengal between India and Myanmar lies a chain of islands that has served as a genetic time capsule for tens of thousands of years.

[00:15:27]The Andaman Islands are home to several indigenous populations whose ancestors are believed to have arrived during the first wave of modern human migration out of Africa approximately 60,000 years ago. They have remained isolated for most of that time. Their genetic lineage, their physical characteristics, and their cultural practices preserve a snapshot of human existence that no other surviving population can offer.

[00:15:56]The andines are dark-skinned and short statured with average heights below 150 cm. Their genetic markers indicate descent from a population that branched off from the rest of humanity before the lineages that gave rise to modern Europeans, Asians, and even most South Asians had differentiated.

[00:16:18]They are not closely related to any of their geographic neighbors. The closest genetic relatives of the Andamenes are not the populations of mainland India or Southeast Asia. The closest relatives in terms of preserved ancestry may be the indigenous peoples of New Guinea and Aboriginal Australians, populations that diverged from the Andes tens of thousands of years ago and have maintained their isolation ever since.

[00:16:46]The implications of their existence challenge the narrative of human prehistory. The standard model of human migration suggests that modern humans left Africa in waves with later waves replacing or absorbing earlier ones across most of the planet. The Andominees should not exist. Their ancestors should have been replaced by subsequent migrations. Just as the original inhabitants of Europe were replaced by farmers from Anatolia, just as the original inhabitants of mainland India were absorbed by later migrations from Central Asia and West Asia. The fact that the andes survived genetically intact on a small chain of islands for 60,000 years means we have a living window into a phase of human existence that should have been erased from the genetic record forever. What makes the Andes particularly important is what they reveal about the lost diversity of early humanity. The first wave of humans out of Africa was likely far more genetically and physically diverse than the populations that descend from it.

[00:17:55]Most of that diversity was lost as later migrations swept across the world. The Andom preserve a fragment of what humanity looked like before that loss.

[00:18:06]Studying them is the closest thing we have to study the original Homo sapiens populations that walked out of Africa and began the colonization of the planet. There were once several distinct Andamenanese tribes, each speaking different languages and inhabiting different islands. Most of them are now extinct. The Bow language went silent in 2010 when its last speaker, a woman named Boa Senior, died in her 80s. With her, an entire branch of the human linguistic tree, possibly preserving features of ancestral languages spoken 60,000 years ago, vanished forever. The great and tribes that once numbered several thousand people now consist of fewer than 50 individuals, all of whom speak a creole derived from multiple now dead languages. The remaining and populations are dying out. disease, displacement, and integration with the modern world are erasing what tens of thousands of years of isolation preserved. Within the next century, the genetic and cultural lineage that connected the present to the first wave of human migration out of Africa will likely be gone. The window into the human past will close. Whatever the Andes could have told us about who we were before we became what we are now will be lost. Some of it has already been lost. The rest is on a timer.

[00:19:35]Number seven, the sand bushmen of the Kalahari.

[00:19:39]In the harsh, arid landscape of southern Africa, the sand people, sometimes called bushmen, have lived as hunter gatherers for longer than any other identifiable human population on Earth.

[00:19:50]Their oral traditions, their rock art, and most importantly, their DNA all point to a single staggering conclusion.

[00:20:00]The SAN are not just an ancient population. They may be the most ancient population. Their genetic lineages branch off from the rest of humanity earlier than any other surviving group.

[00:20:13]Some markers in sand DNA suggest unbroken descent from human populations that lived more than 200,000 years ago.

[00:20:21]To put that timeline in perspective, the oldest agricultural settlements are roughly 12,000 years old. The oldest cities are roughly 6,000 years old. The pyramids of Egypt are 4,500 years old.

[00:20:36]The sand lineage predates all of these by orders of magnitude. When the populations that would become Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, and most modern Africans were still part of an undifferiated common ancestor, the sand were already a distinct lineage. They have remained one ever since. What makes the sand particularly extraordinary is what their genetic diversity reveals about the rest of humanity. Genetic diversity within Africa is greater than the genetic diversity of all non-African populations combined. Within Africa, the sand carry some of the most diverse genetic lineages of any single population. This means a single sand community can contain more genetic variation than entire continents elsewhere in the world. The standard human story, the one in which our species emerged in Africa and spread across the globe, becomes more strange when one realizes that the populations that left Africa carried only a small fraction of the genetic diversity that already existed there. Most of what humanity could have been was left behind. The sand preserve more than DNA.

[00:21:49]Their click languages contain more distinct phonms than any other language family on Earth. Some of these languages have over 100 consonants, including click sounds that are nearly impossible for non-native speakers to learn.

[00:22:03]Linguists have proposed that click sounds may be remnants of an ancestral phonetic inventory that the rest of humanity lost. If true, the San are speaking with a vocal apparatus that preserves features of language as it existed before the great migrations out of Africa restructured human linguistic capabilities.

[00:22:23]The implications extend into territory that unsettles even researchers. If the sand represent an unbroken lineage stretching back 200,000 years or more, then they are not just biologically ancient. They are culturally ancient.

[00:22:39]Their hunter gatherer way of life, their cosmological beliefs, their social structures may preserve elements of human existence as it was practiced before agriculture, before cities, before writing, before nearly everything that the rest of humanity now considers fundamental to being human.

[00:23:02]Watching a sand healing ceremony, a trance dance, a hunting ritual, may be the closest any modern person can come to seeing what the daily life of homo sapiens looked like 100,000 years ago.

[00:23:17]The sand are dying out. Their land has been taken by national parks, by mining concerns, by cattle ranchers. Their hunting traditions are illegal in most of the territory they have occupied for tens of thousands of years. Their languages are not being passed to children. Within a few generations, the oldest continuous lineage of human existence on Earth will be reduced to genetic markers in the bodies of people who no longer remember who their ancestors were. The 200,000year chain will break, and once broken, it cannot be repaired. Number six, the Basks of Europe. In the rugged mountains where Spain meets France, along the coast of the Bay of Bisque lives a population whose existence has puzzled linguists, geneticists, and historians for centuries. The Bas speak a language called Yuskera that has no known relatives. Not in Europe, not in Asia, not anywhere on Earth. Every other language spoken in Europe today belongs to a known family. Indo-Uropean, Uralic, Turk or a handful of others. Yuscara stands alone. It is a linguistic island in a continent that has been linguistically homogenized for thousands of years. The implications became more disturbing when geneticists began studying Basque DNA in the late 20th century. The bases carry some of the highest frequencies of certain genetic markers in Europe, including unusual concentrations of Rh negative blood and specific Y chromosome HLA groups that appear at lower frequencies in surrounding populations.

[00:25:01]The genetic profile suggests something almost impossible. The Bases may be the closest living descendants of the pre-indo-uropean hunter gatherers who inhabited Europe before the great agricultural migrations of the Neolithic period. Approximately 8,000 years ago, farmers from Anatolia began moving into Europe, bringing wheat, livestock, and a completely new way of life. They mixed with the existing hunter gatherer populations across most of the continent, eventually replacing them genetically and culturally in nearly every region.

[00:25:37]Roughly 5,000 years ago, a second wave arrived. Pastoralists from the Pontic Caspian step carrying horses, wheels, and the Indo-European languages that would eventually become Latin, Greek, Celtic, Germanic, and dozens of other tongues. They overwhelmed the populations they encountered. Within a few thousand years, almost every trace of pre-indo-uropean Europe had been erased. But here's where the Basks become extraordinary. They were not erased. Somehow, in a corner of southwestern Europe, a population of pre-aggricultural Europeans held on.

[00:26:18]They preserved their language. They preserved a significant portion of their genetic identity. They watched the rest of the continent transform around them and they refused to transform with it.

[00:26:30]The Roman Empire conquered nearly every territory it touched, but the Basque language survived Roman rule. The Visigoths swept through Iberia, but Yuskera persisted. The Moors held southern Spain for nearly 800 years, but the Bas remained linguistically distinct. Wave after wave of conquerors crossed the Pyrenees and somehow the language and identity of the original inhabitants survived all of them. What makes this survival particularly unsettling is what it suggests about the rest of Europe. If a single isolated population could preserve a pre-Indo-uropean language for thousands of years, how many other such populations existed before being absorbed? How many languages older than every recorded tongue in Europe were spoken across the continent before the migrations swept them away? The Basks are the only surviving fragment of a linguistic and cultural world that once stretched from the Atlantic to the Eurals. Everything else from that world is gone. Whatever stories were told, whatever knowledge was passed down, whatever cosmologies were built across tens of thousands of years of European prehistory vanished without record. The Basks are not a curiosity. They are a tombstone for a continent of vanished civilizations.

[00:27:57]The genetic studies suggest something even more sobering. Modern Europeans carry only a small percentage of pre-Inindo-uropean huntergatherer ancestry. Most of the DNA that walks the streets of Paris or London or Berlin came from Anatolian farmers and step pastoralists who arrived in the last few thousand years. The original Europeans, the people who painted the caves of Lasco, who built the megaliths of Carne, who lived in Europe for tens of thousands of years before agriculture, are mostly gone. Their genetic shadow flickers in modern populations at low frequency. Their language survives in only one place. The Basks are the last echo of who Europe used to be before the demographic events that produced who Europe is now. Number five, the Aenu of Japan. On the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and the Russian island of Sakalin lives a population whose appearance, language, and culture have always seemed slightly out of place in East Asia. The Anu have lighter skin, more body hair, and facial features that distinguish them from their Japanese, Korean, and Chinese neighbors. For centuries, they were classified as a mysterious anomaly. Some early researchers proposed they were a lost population of Caucasians stranded in the Far East. The truth is far stranger. The Inu are descendants of the Jon people, one of the oldest continuous cultures in human history. The Jon civilization began in the Japanese archipelago at least 16,000 years ago. They produced some of the earliest pottery ever discovered, predating ceramic traditions in the Middle East and elsewhere by thousands of years. They lived as semi-edentary hunter gatherers for over 10,000 years before agriculture reached the islands. Their cultural continuity, the unbroken thread of pottery styles, ritual practices, and settlement patterns persisted longer than the entire span of recorded human history.

[00:30:05]Around 2,300 years ago, a new population began arriving in Japan from the Korean Peninsula. The Yayoi people brought rice agriculture, metalwork, and a completely different genetic profile. Within a few centuries, they had transformed the Japanese archipelago.

[00:30:23]Most of the Jon population was absorbed into the incoming Yayoi gene pool, contributing some ancestry to what would become the modern Japanese, but losing most of their cultural and linguistic identity in the process. Most of the Jon, but not all of them. In the north, on the cold and isolated island of Hokkaido, the descendants of the Jon held on. They became the Anu. What makes the Anu particularly important is what they preserve. Their genetic markers retain a high percentage of Jon ancestry, possibly the highest of any modern population. Their language, like Basque, has no clear relatives. Their cosmology centers on a complex relationship with bears and other animals that researchers believe may preserve elements of belief systems practiced by Joman peoples 16,000 years ago. The traditional Aenu bear ceremony in which a captured bear cub is raised within a community for years before being ritually killed and sent back to the spirit world may be the closest modern parallel to ritual practices that defined human spirituality across northern Eurasia in the late pleaene.

[00:31:40]The implications become more troubling when one considers the scope of what was lost. The Jon civilization existed for longer than any other known continuous culture. They built villages with ceremonial structures. They developed regional artistic traditions that lasted thousands of years. They engaged in trade across the Japanese archipelago and possibly with mainland populations.

[00:32:05]And nearly all of it has been erased.

[00:32:07]The Yayoi expansion absorbed or displaced the Jon across nearly the entire archipelago. What survives in the form of the Anu is a fragment, a small population in the cold north, holding on to pieces of a civilization that once spanned thousands of kilome and lasted longer than any empire that ever existed. The Anu have been systematically marginalized by the Japanese state for over a thousand years. Their land was taken, their language was banned, their cultural practices were suppressed. By the late 20th century, fluent speakers of the Aenu language numbered in the dozens.

[00:32:46]The Japanese government did not officially recognize the Aenu as an indigenous people until 2008. By that point, the cultural transmission that had sustained their identity for 16,000 years had been severely fractured. Most modern AU have only partial knowledge of their traditional practices. Most cannot speak the ancestral language. The chain that connected the present to one of the oldest civilizations on Earth has been ground down to fragile, scattered links.

[00:33:17]What remains is being studied frantically by linguists and anthropologists who understand that they are documenting the final phase of a culture that began before the end of the last ice age.

[00:33:30]Number four, the Tasmanian Aboriginals.

[00:33:33]Around 12,000 years ago, as the last ice age came to an end, sea levels around the world began to rise. Massive volumes of water that had been locked in continental ice sheets returned to the oceans, drowning coastlines and severing land bridges that had connected continents and islands for tens of thousands of years. One of these severed connections was the Bassian plane, a stretch of land that had linked the island of Tasmania to mainland Australia. When the waters rose, the population living on Tasmania was cut off from the rest of humanity. They would remain isolated for over 10,000 years. What happened during that isolation has no parallel in human history. The Tasmanian Aboriginals, separated from all other human populations, developed in complete genetic and cultural isolation for longer than any other documented human group. By the time European explorers arrived in the 18th century, the Tasmanians represented something extraordinary. A population of modern Homo sapiens who had been living without external contact for approximately 400 generations. Their material culture, their language, their genetic profile and their physical adaptations had all evolved along an independent trajectory.

[00:34:51]They were not primitive. They were divergent. They had become a distinct branch of human existence. The implications are deeply unsettling. Some researchers have argued that the Tasmanians lost certain technologies during their isolation, including the ability to make fire from scratch, certain types of fishing equipment, and bone tool traditions that mainland Australian populations retained. This pattern, sometimes called cultural simplification or technological regression, suggests that small isolated populations can lose accumulated knowledge over time. If true, the Tasmanians demonstrate that human cultural progress is not inevitable.

[00:35:35]Knowledge can be lost. Skills can be forgotten. without sufficient population size to maintain the chain of cultural transmission, even capabilities developed over thousands of years can disappear within a few generations.

[00:35:50]Other researchers dispute the technological loss narrative, arguing that the Tasmanians had adapted their toolkit to their specific environment rather than regressed. The debate continues, but what no one disputes is the Tasmanian significance as a window into prehistoric human existence.

[00:36:09]They lived the way humans had lived for most of Homo sapiens's existence on Earth. Small mobile bands, hunting and gathering across a defined territory.

[00:36:21]Knowledge passed through oral tradition.

[00:36:24]Tools made from local materials. They were a living preservation of a phase of human life that nearly every other population on Earth had abandoned long ago. What makes their story particularly devastating is what came next. European contact began in 1772.

[00:36:44]By 1803, Britain had established a penal colony on Tasmania. Within 30 years, the indigenous population had been reduced from an estimated 5,000 to a few hundred individuals through violence, disease, and forced relocation.

[00:37:00]The Black War of the 1820s and 1830s saw colonial militias systematically hunting the Tasmanian Aboriginals across the island. The survivors were rounded up and exiled to Flender's Island, where they continued to die from disease and despair.

[00:37:19]In 1876, a woman named Truganini died in Hobart. She was widely believed to be the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal. 10,000 years of isolated human evolution, 10,000 years of distinct culture, 10,000 years of an independent branch of humanity ended in less than a single century of contact.

[00:37:42]The genetic legacy survives. Modern Tasmanian Aboriginal communities descended primarily from indigenous women and European sealers carry the genetic markers of their ancestors.

[00:37:55]Their cultural revival in recent decades has reclaimed elements of language and practice that were nearly lost. But the population that walked the forests of Tasmania for 10,000 years in unbroken isolation is gone. The branch of humanity that diverged at the end of the ice age was severed almost entirely within a few human lifetimes. Whatever they knew, whatever they had become was destroyed in a window so brief that the European nations responsible were still using musketss when it began and only beginning to electrify their cities when it ended. Number three, the Sentinel of North Sentinel Island. Approximately 1,200 kilometers off the eastern coast of India in the Bay of Bengal lies an island roughly the size of Manhattan. It is covered in dense tropical forest surrounded by coral reefs and inhabited by perhaps 50 to 100 people. No outsider has ever lived among them. No outsider has ever spoken their language.

[00:39:01]No outsider has ever been welcomed onto their beaches and lived to describe the experience. The Sentinel, the indigenous inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, may be the most isolated human population on Earth. The Sentineles are believed to be descendants of the original and populations that arrived in the region approximately 60,000 years ago, possibly as part of the first wave of modern human migration out of Africa.

[00:39:29]They have remained on their small island for tens of thousands of years, almost completely cut off from the rest of humanity. They have rejected nearly every attempt at contact. They greet approaching boats with arrows. They kill outsiders who set foot on their beaches.

[00:39:47]They have maintained their isolation through what can only be described as a deliberate multigenerational refusal to engage with the outside world.

[00:39:57]What makes the Sentineles particularly extraordinary is what their isolation preserves. Genetically, they may represent one of the closest living connections to the populations that first left Africa. Their lineage has not been diluted by subsequent migrations.

[00:40:14]Their language, almost certainly unrelated to any other living tongue, may preserve features of speech that disappeared from the rest of humanity tens of thousands of years ago. Their material culture, which appears to include only stone, bone, and wooden tools, may approximate the technological level of humans at the dawn of behavioral modernity. They are not just isolated. They are a snapshot of who we used to be, frozen in continuous existence for longer than the entirety of recorded human history. The implications become more disturbing when one considers what this means for the rest of humanity.

[00:40:53]The Centineles have lived on their island for approximately 60,000 years.

[00:40:59]Modern global civilization has existed for approximately 5,000 years. The Centennles way of life, which most observers would describe as Stone Age, has persisted 12 times longer than the entire span of cities, writing, agriculture, and everything else humanity considers civilization.

[00:41:20]From the perspective of total human existence on Earth, the Sentinel represent the norm. We represent the deviation. The way they live is the way humans lived for most of our species history. The way we live is a recent and possibly temporary experiment. The Indian government has officially adopted a hands-off policy toward North Sentinel Island. Approaching the island is illegal. The Sentinel have demonstrated repeatedly that they want no contact with the outside world. They have killed fishermen who drifted too close to their shores. They killed an American missionary in 2018 who attempted to convert them. They have maintained their separation through violence whenever necessary, and the modern world has for once decided to respect that boundary, but the boundary cannot hold forever.

[00:42:12]Climate change is rising sea levels. The reefs that surround North Sentinel are dying. Ships pass closer to the island every decade. The diseases that decimated the Tasmanians and the Andominees are only one accidental contact away from devastating a population that has no immune defenses against modern pathogens. The Sentinel have preserved their isolation against every threat for 60,000 years. The threats they now face, climate change, economic pressure, accidental disease transmission, may finally be the ones that cannot be repelled with arrows.

[00:42:51]When the last Sentinel dies, the longest continuous lineage of isolated human existence on Earth will end. The window into the first wave out of Africa will close and the species that produced both them and us will lose its oldest living mirror. Number two, the homo floresensis hobbits. In 2003, a team of Australian and Indonesian researchers excavating Leang Bua cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia made a discovery that fundamentally changed the understanding of human evolution.

[00:43:28]They found the partial skeleton of a small adult female who stood approximately 3 feet tall. Her brain was the size of a chimpanzees. Her bones showed primitive features that did not match any known human population. The dating placed her at approximately 18,000 years ago, deep into the period when modern homo sapiens were thought to be the only human species left on Earth.

[00:43:55]She was not alone. Subsequent excavations revealed remains of at least nine individuals. They were given the species name Homo floriciansis.

[00:44:05]But the popular press immediately gave them another name. The hobbits. Tiny humans who had lived on a remote Indonesian island, surviving in a world that the textbooks had insisted contained only one species of human for the last 30,000 years. The textbooks were wrong. The hobbits proved that human evolution had been far more complex than anyone had realized. The most disturbing aspect of the discovery was the timing. Initial dating suggested the hobbits had survived until at least 18,000 years ago. Later analysis revised the latest dates to approximately 50,000 years ago, but the question of how recently they vanished remains unsettled.

[00:44:51]Local mythology on the island of Flores describes a population called the Ebug Go, small hairy people who lived in the forests and caves of the island until relatively recent times. The legends describe encounters between Iugo and modern human villagers. The Iugo were said to be small, covered in hair, and capable of mimicking human speech without understanding it. They were said to steal food from the villages. The villagers, according to the legends, eventually drove them out by setting fire to a cave where they were sleeping.

[00:45:26]The legends were dismissed as folklore for over a century. The discovery of homop floresensis remains dated to a period overlapping with modern human presence on the island has forced researchers to reconsider.

[00:45:41]The ebugogo legends may not be mythology. They may be cultural memory of actual encounters between modern homo sapiens and a surviving population of hobbits. If true, modern humans on Flores witnessed the extinction of another human species and they preserved the memory of it in oral tradition for thousands of years. The cave fire described in the legends may be the historical extinction event of an entire human lineage.

[00:46:12]What makes homo floresensis particularly significant is what they suggest about the diversity of recent human existence.

[00:46:20]They were not homo sapiens. They were not neanderthalss or denisovvens. They were a separate human species possibly descended from homo erectus populations that had reached flores hundreds of thousands of years earlier and become trapped on the island undergoing insular dwarfism over tens of thousands of generations.

[00:46:41]They survived alongside modern humans.

[00:46:44]They overlapped with us and they died out possibly with our involvement within the relatively recent past. The implications widen the more one examines them.

[00:46:58]If Homo floresensis survived on a small Indonesian island until quite recently, how many other relicked populations of archaic humans persisted in isolated regions that have not yet been excavated?

[00:47:11]Southeast Asia is full of caves that have never been explored. The island chains of Indonesia and the Philippines contain hundreds of remote locations that could have hosted similar small populations. The homalusinensis remains discovered in the Philippines in 2019 which represent yet another previously unknown human species from the same general region suggests that homo floresensis was not an isolated case.

[00:47:39]There may have been multiple separate populations of small-bodied humans across Southeast Asia. Each evolving independently on their islands, each surviving until recent times, each eventually vanishing without leaving more than fragmentaryary bones and folklore behind.

[00:47:55]Number one, the Denisovvens.

[00:47:58]In 2008, archaeologists working in Denisova cave in the Alai Mountains of southern Siberia recovered a small fragment of bone. It was a piece of a finger bone less than the size of a fingernail belonging to a young girl who had died approximately 50,000 years ago.

[00:48:18]The bone was sent to the laboratory of geneticist Svante Pao for DNA analysis.

[00:48:25]The results announced in 2010 fundamentally rewrote the human family tree. The bone did not belong to a homo sapiens. It did not belong to a Neanderthal. It belonged to an entirely new species of human that no one had known existed. They were called the Denisovvens.

[00:48:45]The discovery was extraordinary, but the implications were even more so. Genetic analysis of modern human populations revealed that the Denisven had not simply gone extinct. They had interbred with the ancestors of modern humans.

[00:49:01]Their DNA still circulates in the cells of millions of people alive today.

[00:49:07]Indigenous populations across Southeast Asia, Melanesia, the Philippines, and Tibet carry varying percentages of Denisovven ancestry. Some Melanesian populations carry up to 5% of their DNA from this archaic species.

[00:49:22]Filipino Negrito groups, particularly the Ita Magbukan, carry the highest known percentage of Denisovven ancestry on Earth. What makes the Denisovvens particularly extraordinary is how little we know about them despite their genetic legacy. Almost no Denisovven fossils have been found. A finger bone, a few teeth, a partial jawbone from Tibet, fragments of skull from a different cave in Tibet.

[00:49:51]That is essentially everything we have.

[00:49:53]We do not know what they looked like. We do not know how tall they were. We do not know how their faces were structured. an entire species of humans who lived across vast stretches of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, who interbred with our ancestors and contributed genetic material to populations of millions of people alive today, is known almost entirely through fragments of bone smaller than a coin.

[00:50:19]The implications turn personal in a way that no other discovery on this list does. If you are reading this and you have ancestry from Southeast Asia, Melanesia, or the Pacific, then a measurable percentage of your DNA was contributed by a species of human that science had no idea existed until 2010.

[00:50:41]The genes that help Tibetans survive at high altitude. The genes that contribute to immune function in Melanesians. The genes that may influence everything from facial structure to disease resistance in millions of people were inherited from a population of archaic humans whose name was unknown to the scientific community 15 years ago.

[00:51:03]You may carry the genetic legacy of a species you cannot picture, whose voice was never recorded, whose face was never drawn, whose existence was unknown to every philosopher and scientist who lived before the year 2010.

[00:51:18]The Denisovvens tell us that human prehistory is not what we thought it was. The story is not of one species emerging in Africa and spreading across the world to replace its predecessors.

[00:51:31]The story is of multiple human species existing simultaneously across the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, encountering each other, sometimes fighting, sometimes interbreeding, sometimes simply absorbing each other into new genetic configurations.

[00:51:50]The species we call homo sapiens is not a pure lineage. It is a hybrid, the product of multiple ancient interbreeding events with at least three known archaic species and possibly more we have not yet identified. The truly disturbing implication is the scale of what remains unknown. The Denisovvens were discovered through a single bone fragment from a single cave. There may be dozens of other archaic human species whose genetic contributions are circulating in modern populations, whose bones have not yet been found, whose names will never be known. Every modern human, regardless of ancestry, is a walking archive of extinct human species. We are the survivors of a multiecies genus that once contained dozens of branches. Most of those branches are gone. Their physical forms are gone. Their voices are gone. Their cultures and beliefs and ways of being are gone. But fragments of them remain inside us, expressed in our genes, our bodies, our adaptations to environments we never lived in, encoded into the cells of populations who do not know that part of who they are came from species. The world had to wait 50,000 years to even discover existed. If you want to see more videos like this, click the video on screen now and make sure to subscribe.