Ella Al-Shamahi

We used to think Neanderthals were kind of 200,000 years old, went extinct 40,000 years ago.

Like that's kind of classic Neanderthals.

For years before that, like up to 350,000 years, there's kind of this, for a while, we'd see it as this grey zone where you could kind of see Neanderthal features coming in.

There were some Spanish Neanderthals, a quite famous collection of Neanderthals, who people were always arguing, are they Neanderthal, are they not Neanderthal?

the Semana de los Huesos Neanderthals.

And you can hear probably from the fact that I'm calling them Neanderthals that the genetic evidence started coming in and it was overwhelmingly clear that they were the Neanderthals.

So then very recently, the date got pushed back to, okay, well, Neanderthals are 350,000 years.

I just imagined like, you know, they're probably taking a lot of offense at how they keep getting older.

But then, oh, it's been a real stir recently because Chris Stringer, who, for those of you who are maybe under a rock or are just new to paleoanthropology, Chris Stringer is the don of paleoanthropology.

That's what we have to do, yes.

He's living shrine at the Natural History Museum because he's kind of still there.

But yeah, he's an absolutely incredible paleoanthropologist.

And he and a number of Chinese colleagues, they have new dates on another species called Denisovans.

Now, bear with me, right?

Because I'm talking about Denisovans, but I'm talking about Neanderthals.

So...

The thing with our family tree is we consider the Neanderthals to be our sister species, and by that I mean that they are our closest relatives and we share a common ancestor.

Yes, exactly, like this shape basically, like a triangle.

But then the Denisovans we also consider to be the sister species of Neanderthals or very, very closely related.

So it's kind of like actually now there's a three-way thing going on.