Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

We don't know where it happened.

And one of the things I'll sort of finish with, because I know we're hitting our time here.

So two things.

First of all, this really great Japanese video game company actually created a video game using the signs, like from the geometric signs, that's called iMother.

And it's about a Neanderthal woman

who gets separated from her tribe.

It's such a cool game.

It's really hard.

It's a puzzle game.

So be prepared.

But you can actually... She uses symbols she's finding made by humans and stuff to start decoding things.

They actually explored that whole idea.

So I just had to throw that in there because it's a really interesting educational... How do we do something educational with ancient history?

The other thing I wanted to just flag is, so if we want to answer these big questions, because you can see we're talking about intercontinental questions.

We're looking for patterns across continents.

We're looking for patterns across hundreds of, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years.

We could not live in a better time than right now to be asking those kinds of questions.

It feels like just an incredible intersection of technology meets capacity, right?

Which is that we have all this data, which we've been busily squirreling away for the last hundred years, and we've been asking questions as big as we could, but we could be asking bigger.

And a lot of what you're asking about goes to those really large questions of we need to understand at a civilizational scale, both in terms of Homo sapiens and in terms of Neanderthals and Denisovans, what were they doing?