Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

There's so much evidence of kindness and care and connection there, right?

And so it's like, slowly but surely, all of the barriers of what make modern humans, Homo sapiens, special, different,

up here on our little pedestal, have started to knock away, right?

And so, oh, wait, they're wearing jewelry.

Oh, look, they're choosing special colors to use, right?

Like with pigments.

Oh, look, they're carefully collecting eagle feathers and crow, like raven feathers, for real, and talons.

And they seem to have been doing something that maybe was a headdress.

What a crazy concept.

So you can see how art was like the last bastion, right?

But they didn't make art.

It was so funny that this was a thing.

And so it's been really interesting because this has all happened over the course of my career.

When I was an undergraduate, which now is just about 20 years ago,

And, um, so not very long ago.

And at that point we were taught as undergrads that humans and Neanderthals did not interbreed and that Neanderthals may have been doing some things, but they don't seem to have quite been us.

Like that was, and I'm not slamming my professors.

Like that was just, that was the common thing.

And then, you know, fast forward about five years, Svante Paabo and his team there and Max Plank sequenced the genome.

Oh, wait, wait,