David Reich

So this is outside my area of expertise of being very much like a scientist right here, but I'm very sympathetic to the idea that it's hardly genetic.

So I think that this is cultural innovation.

It's very natural to think that this is cultural innovation.

And humans sometimes develop a new technique of storing information, sharing information,

and so on, for example, writing, which allows you to record collective knowledge in a library or computational knowledge or large storage devices and so on and so forth.

Language, conceptual language, which allow you to create a cultural body of knowledge.

Well, I don't know what the language was.

I mean, it's almost certainly the case that Neanderthals were using...

sounds and communicating in ways that are probably pretty complicated, complex, and amount to some kind of language.

But some people think that language in its modern form is not that old and might coincide with the later Stone Age, Upper Paleolithic Revolution, 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, and might be specific to our lineage, and that there might be a qualitative shift in the type of language that's being used.

There's been one incredibly interesting and weird...

line of genetic evidence that was so weird that a lot of people I know dropped off the paper.

They just didn't want to be associated with it because it was so weird and they just thought it might be wrong.

But it's stood up as far as I can tell.

It's just so weird.

So this is one of the things that surprises that genetics keeps delivering.

I think that that's probably going to come across in this conversation, which is I am

pretty humbled by the type of data that I'm involved in collecting.

It's very surprising, this type of data.

Again and again, it's not what we expect.