Ella Al-Shamahi

And every so often we would leave Africa.

And this was a thing.

We constantly actually left Africa.

But we would leave and we never really got a foothold and we'd become locally extinct.

And it was just this pattern that just kept going on.

Actually, the first time we think we left and we interacted with the Neanderthals was probably in the Middle East.

In fact, it would have been in the Middle East.

There's a lot of evidence for us being contemporaneous with the Neanderthals in that region.

There's an incredible mountain called Mount Carmel in Israel that has two caves.

One cave is called Tabon, which is a Neanderthal cave.

And around the same time, so 90,000 to 120,000 years, there was this overlap with the occupants of another cave called Scholl.

And Scholl had, well, it was a Homo sapiens cave.

And firstly, let's just acknowledge how amazing that neighborhood must have been.

The same mountain.

We think the same time.

You've got a cave of Neanderthals and a cave of Homo sapiens.

And what I love about this is we actually included this in the series Human in the first episode.

It was kind of like an on-the-fly edit.

We were kind of like, actually, let's include this.

This is such a cool story.