Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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.
But the important thing from our point of view is this is right before Neanderthals split again.
And there was an offshoot of them who became the Denisovans, the new species who went to Asia.
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.
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.