David Reich

Anatomically modern humans occur exactly here.

It's the same moment.

This is when they occur.

The people who like have skeletal features like ours and Neanderthals appear exactly then.

This is when it all happens.

So like this is when we, there is this disconnect between anatomically modern humans and the skeletal record and between, you know,

behaviorally modern humans, which is 50 to 100,000 years ago, but anatomically modern humans appear at this time.

And actually recognizable Neanderthals appear roughly around this time too.

My understanding is no.

They're busy making level-washed stone tools like Neanderthals for 200,000 years, and not more impressive than Neanderthals in any way, and in any obvious way, as I understand.

And then there begins to be, in the archaeological record, a quickening of behavioral traits, which could be not genetic at all, or it could be genetic.

You know, there's lots of arguments about this.

But, you know, people are obsessed with, you know, like we were obsessed with intelligence earlier in our conversation.

But people are obsessed with art and, you know, these things that seem important to us.

But, like, who knows what's important?

Yeah.

The work that I've been involved in has consistently shown that I was wrong in my biases coming into the work.

And I've really been almost traumatized by this.

Like again and again, I've come into a project with some kind of guess about what the data was showing, and then the data doesn't show that.

So for example, when I got involved in the Neanderthal Genome Project and helping to analyze data, looking at how archaic Neanderthals were related to modern humans,