Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

And so people have argued whether this is Homo hydrogensis or if these are early Neanderthals.

So it's kind of like somewhere around 400-ish thousand, 500,000.

They're starting to split enough that they might be different species now, right?

Can you see how it's kind of like the slow progression?

And so they were intentionally placing their dead in this pit.

Cima de los Huesos means pit of bones, basically.

And they were able to do genetic sequencing on these people from like 440,000 years ago, I think.

So what they were able to show is that these were early Neanderthals.

They'd probably call them archaic.

But the important thing from our point of view is this is right before Neanderthals split again.

to become Neanderthals in Europe.

And there was an offshoot of them who became the Denisovans, the new species who went to Asia.

And so that happened around 420,000.

And so now we have the players.

We've got Neanderthals in Europe, we've got Denisovans in Asia, and we've got our own Homo sapiens relatives in Africa.

And we would consider Homo sapiens to be a full-blown different species by around 300,000 this years ago, though, again, that number could change.

It was 200,000 not that long ago.

But the bottom line is,

We're still incredibly similar.

And so Neanderthals, again, they have sort of this vision of them kind of being short and squat and kind of hanging around up just in the ice.