What Caused The Extinction Of The Neanderthals The Neanderthal in Us

During the Stone Age, 40,000 years ago, the whole of Europe was inhabited by Neanderthals. Proud hunters. They do not know any human beings other than themselves. And suddenly, strangers appear in their hunting grounds. They look different and are different. Modern human beings. The beginning of the end of the Neanderthals. What went on between these Stone Age people and our ancestors? Did they fight or mix? Might they even have had children together? How much of the Neanderthal is there in us? Who had sex with whom 30 to 40,000 years ago is of no interest to me. They could do as they liked. I'm interested in what influences me today. The Neanderthals. A myth worldwide. They were strong. They survived in a harsh environment. Our closest relatives are brothers from the Ice Age. Their life and death has baffled researchers. The Neanderthals survived for 300,000 years in Europe of the Ice Age. And we haven't existed for anywhere near as long as that. The question is, why did they disappear? The Neanderthals were the only other human beings with whom we shared this planet for a couple of thousand years. To learn more about them would mean to learn more about ourselves. One of the questions that I've been asking for too long now is, why was it that modern humans were able to spread and by one mechanism or another become the dominant form of human biology in a geologically relatively short period of time? You know, still over a period of 10 or 20,000 years. The riddle of the Neanderthal genetic code. An international team of scientists is unraveling the mystery. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany are the first to have decoded the genome of an extinct human being. For the Swedish geneticist Svante Peabo, the dream of a lifetime has come true. In fact, we started working with Neanderthals before 97. And five years ago, decoding the complete genome was still a dream. For three years, we've actually been working on it. A year ago, we had the data and we evaluated them over the year. Now we're ready. We can dare to say something about them. Johannes Krause, a passionate researcher, has been involved since the beginning. Decoding has posed the greatest challenge so far to the team. We constantly had to establish new methods, other technologies. We had to apply different methods and it was an up and down all the way. There was a lot of excitement, tension too, because expectations were very high. The central question, has anything of the Neanderthal survived in us? The Regional Museum in Bonn. In this case, are the world's most famous bones. They are the crown jewels of German archaeology. Ralf Schmitz is the custodian of this treasure. The first Neanderthal ever to be found, whose name was given to a whole species of humans. Archaeologist Ralf Schmitz knows these bones better than anyone else. His professional life has revolved completely around them. Neanderthals. This prehistoric human, who existed 42,000 years ago, lived to be about 40 years old. Only 16 bones have survived down the thousands of years. Is the key to unlocking the secret of the Neanderthal genome hidden in them? He is the most famous German of all, but he is a European. He is the only species of human ever to have developed in Europe. And if there is a form of human being which represents Europe and the Europeans, then it is indeed Neanderthal man. The story begins in a quarry near Dusseldorf in Germany in 1856. It's a hard day for the workers. Hacking away at the stone, shoveling in the blazing heat, they come upon bones and thoughtlessly tip them down the slope. The world would never have heard of Neanderthals if the quarry owner hadn't been curious. Are these the remains of a cave-dwelling bear? Having a passion for fossils, the quarry owner orders the workers to look for other bones. A skull comes to light the world has never seen before. Strange, what can it mean? These bones were found in Neanderthal, a romantic spot on the river Dussel near Mettmann. Until the middle of the 19th century, the Neanderthal was an absolutely beautiful, intact natural landscape. Steep chalk cliffs up to 50 meters high towered above both sides of the Dussel. This romantic narrow gorge was first called Gesteins and later renamed Neanderthal after Joachim Neander, a writer of hymns. The Neander Valley 200 years ago, when it was still unspoiled. In one of these caves, the Neanderthal was probably laid to rest by his tribe. Prehistoric humans found shelter in a narrow valley with majestic towering cliffs through which flowed the Dussel. Just as it does today, 40,000 years later. An ideal which inspired painters and poets. Today, it would be a nature reserve. But then came industrialization and the lime from the Neander Valley became a much desired raw material for the ironworks in the Ruhr area. Thousands find work in the quarry. This is the end of the Neander Valley. As yet no one has any idea what the quarry owners finds of bones might mean. This is of course the best known fossil in the world and is in fact the fossil which, 150 years ago, made us realize that other forms of humans, not entirely like us, had existed. At that time, nobody believed in the existence of prehistoric human beings. Only Johann Fuhroth, a teacher, understands immediately that these bones came from a stone age human. Did Neanderthals actually exist? The scientific elite argue bitterly over this question. The greatest opponent to this theory is the most renowned doctor of his times, Rudolf Wischow from Berlin, the founder of pathology. He examines the bones in great detail and comes to a conclusion with serious consequences. They come from a sick modern human who was terribly deformed. The bones of a sick human? Wischow's words have formed the cliché of the dumb Neanderthal right up to today. It is so deep-rooted. The hunched posture, the dull expression in the eyes, club in hand. It's a distorted picture. 40,000 years later, character assassination. The Neanderthal is a hairy savage. More ape than human. Brutal and stupid. A stone age half-wit. Inferior to us in every way. A sensational find in Croatia in 1899 distorts the picture even more. Johanna's causa visits the caves in Krapina. Nowhere have more Neanderthal bones been discovered. The Krapina site, what we think now, at this time of our knowledge, we think that we have between 75 and 80 individuals. Based on dental sample. You know, if you study post-crania, your information might be somehow different. The find in Krapina gives rise to a gruesome suspicion. Did the Neanderthals who lived here really only eat meat from animals? Traces on bones suggest something terrible. Some people argue for cannibalism, so that you had accumulation because this was a place where they performed cannibalism. What is the reason for cannibalistic behavior? We don't know. It could be ritual, it could be starvation. So again, Krapina is quite an unusual sample. You have also cut marks on the bones, so it seems to be that they somehow were butchered in some way. There are some ways, you know, butchering, some way of, they didn't respect their debts, so they are butchering burned bones again. But again, this idea of cannibalistic, it was quite well known for the Krapina sample because of this fragmentation, because of this, many bones are just, you know, split, broken, fragmented. In his office in the Croatian Natural History Museum in Zagreb, Radović shows his German colleague the carefully guarded evidence. One of the largest Neanderthal collections in the world with hundreds of bones. Some have been so maltreated that there can only be one explanation, says the researcher. In this box, you have many bones, you know, split bones, longitudinal bones. So if you take, let's say, for instance, this bone, some people think that this is a good evidence for splitting to extract mineral. So this was evidence for cannibalistic behaviour with Krapina. Along these bones, at some points, you will find also different cut marks, you know, like removing soft tissue. So there are many bones like this, long bones. Were the Neanderthals from Krapina really brutal cannibals? Other researchers have their doubts. They discovered mysterious marks on one of the skulls, a row of notches at regular intervals. They cannot be a coincidence. There are many, many scratches here, which are, you know, very narrow and very dense. Someone was trying to mark this specimen, or this person who just died. So this is, you know, quite unusual behaviour for Neanderthals. So what's the meaning of that, we don't know, but it could be evidence for symbolic behaviour. The suspicion alone was enough. The alleged cannibals from Krapina ruined the Neanderthals' reputation for good. Such a monster was not suitable as a role model, an ancestor, but more as a horrible example of evolution. In Nazi Germany, the law of the jungle ruled, and it was said that the steel-hard Aryan had annihilated the inferior Neanderthal. A school book of the time talks about the crude Neanderthal, who was inferior to the nobler race. In Hitler's Germany, there was no place for Neanderthals. The Nazis treated Neanderthals with disdain. Neanderthals didn't fit in with the Nazis' ideal of race. We should be glad that the original specimen has been preserved. Because of this, the Nazis actually closed down the first German Neanderthal museum. Its modern successor, located near the site of the find, is a great crowd-puller nowadays. The Neanderthal myth. From ridiculed club-swinger to stone-age superstar. What an astonishing career. The image we have of our closest relatives has changed dramatically since they were first discovered. Scientists worldwide want to know who they were and how they lived. But most of all, what have they got to do with us? Neanderthals moved swiftly and completely upright through their surroundings. They probably had alert, intelligent eyes, or they would not have survived. They used fire, wore clothes, and were able to speak. They were highly intelligent Ice Age hunters, living like the Inuit do nowadays on the edge of the Arctic. That's how they should be seen, and then you're on the right track. Today, we know that Neanderthals were social beings, like us. That they were real human beings, our mirror image. They were, above all, skilled hunters, who honed their skills over generations. Only so could they have survived in the harsh environment. Initiation into hunting, a very important lesson in the life of a Neanderthal. They were faster, more muscular, and stronger than any modern human. At today's Olympics, the Neanderthals would win most of the gold medals. The fascination with Neanderthals is shared worldwide. The American Eric Trinkaus has been a proponent of this thesis for years. We mixed and had sex with the Neanderthals. I've always thought of the processes that were involved in Neanderthal modern human evolution and their interaction when they met in terms of populations, in terms of the messy, complicated dynamics of populations. And gene flow, that is exchange of mates and having offspring between these populations, is a part, is a natural part of populations. And I've always looked at the world that way. Eric Trinkaus is one of the world's foremost experts on Neanderthals. At his excavations all over the world, he has come upon skeletons, which could be from a mixed race, Neanderthals and us. But the evidence was missing. Genetic engineering methods had not yet been developed. And that's sort of the fascination of Neanderthals. They're very close to us, they're almost us, but they're not quite us. They are our mirror image and at the same time they are other human beings. Neanderthals had refined techniques at their disposal. They obtained color from various stones and made spears, which are no way inferior to modern instruments. They obtained the fuse, the tinder to make fire, from fungus growing on trees. They were particularly skilled in working with stone. Razor sharp scrapers and spearheads made by stone age master craftsmen. They also deserve our respect. They lived at a very harsh time in a very dangerous landscape with a technology and overall cultural elaboration considerably less than ours. And they survived under those conditions for hundreds of thousands of years. And we tend to put down the Neanderthals, consider them primitive, stupid, whatever. I would make a bet that if any one of us, and I include myself in this, were suddenly placed back in a Neanderthal society and had to make a living, we might last a few months, maybe. Back in Leipzig, scientists at the Max Planck Institute are busy analyzing the Neanderthal diet. In the isotope laboratory, minute particles of Neanderthal bone are examined. The results? Prehistoric humans' diet was completely different to ours. Because there was one thing that they needed more than anything else. Meat. And plenty of it. We see Neanderthals are sort of super predators. So let's imagine a group of lion living on a territory. And these lions, they need a lot of kills. They need to catch animals to survive. And if they don't kill enough animals, they die. This craving for meat drives them on. They are always out on the hunt. Roaming through vast areas to get enough prey. Sometimes it is merely harmless deer or reindeer that they hunt. But Neanderthals are not at all afraid of close combat with dangerous animals, like mammoths or bears. They hunt in groups and know how to overcome an animal. And how to kill it. It must have been quite spectacular. Let's imagine a group of Neanderthals trying to catch a young rhino. It's really something we have difficulties even figuring out. Because one thing we know is that they don't have much weapons to kill at distance. We know that they have, for example, wooden spears, things like that. But honestly, it looks like most of these weapons were used at a very short range. The prey often needed to be hauled for miles back to camp. There was good reason the Neanderthals were such muslims in comparison to us. The animal would be taken apart in front of the cave. If you depend on meat and do not exploit other sources of nourishment, you will be vulnerable. If stocks of game diminish. Or if there are extreme changes in climate. Is this a reason for their disappearance? Extinction is a normal part of evolutionary history. And one day we too will disappear. And so it's interesting to find out why the Neanderthals survived for so long. And why they became extinct. Using the most modern of methods, anthropologists at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig are trying to uncover the mystery. The jawbones of a mere child of eight were found in a cave in Belgium. This is a particularly valuable find because fossils of young Neanderthals are rare. The jawbones open a window in time onto the growth of Stone Age hunters. The naked eye is not enough. To get more information from the fossil, it is scanned three-dimensionally. This reveals even the inner structures. From the resulting data, something never seen before in the history of science has been created. A virtual Neanderthal. In the virtual reality room in Leipzig, French scientist Jean-Jacques Oblon observes the digital rebirth of a Neanderthal. He invented this technology, which has been connecting prehistory with high-tech since 1992. In this way, he discovered a surprising difference between humans and Neanderthals. That's a very interesting and very important specimen. And so it's very important to look at fossils like this one. This is a mandible of a Neanderthal child, and to try to evaluate the speed of development of these individuals. So here we have a mandible with a second molar, which is already erupted, and a third molar, which is building up inside the mandible. And by modern standard, this individual should be about 12 years old. But if we look at internal microstructures of the teeth, these lines which are in the enamel, a little bit like the tree rings in a piece of food, and which help us to evaluate the time of development, we find out that actually this individual was only eight years old when he died. And so it means basically that Neanderthals, at least regarding dental development, grew up faster than we do. This means the Neanderthals had a shorter childhood. They had much less time than our children to learn survival skills, such as hunting. On the other hand, they were able to look after themselves much earlier. There are, of course, other differences between humans and Neanderthals. Looking at the skeleton for the first time, it is evident how different both kinds of humans are. Jean-Jacques Houblon compares two skeletons. Would we recognize a Neanderthal at first sight? If you would meet a Neanderthal in the street, that would look the most weird is his face and his head. And it has a big head with a large brain, like our brain. But the face is very much projected in front of the brain case. And you have this very receding forehead, which is a major difference between a modern human and a Neanderthal. These very strong brow ridges above the orbit, very large orbits, and all the face being projected forward and with a lack of chin. But of course, the real question is what kind of differences we have in there. And although Neanderthals have a large brain like modern humans, we know that they developed this brain a different way in terms of speed, but also in terms of shape and internal organization. And we would really like to know what this implies in terms of the way the brain works. Neanderthals were very fixed in their ways. They adapted to their environment perfectly and hardly changed their way of life over thousands of years. In contrast to modern humans, who were innovative and who evolved. We assume that Neanderthals lived in groups of perhaps 20 people. The total population can't have exceeded 20,000. Neanderthals of the later period lived in a Europe very different to the one we know today. During the last ice age 39,000 years ago, the south was covered in dense forest. In central Europe, there were mainly conifers. In the north, tundra. Scandinavia was an inhospitable semi-desert crowned by an ice cap. Few as they were, the Neanderthals populated a vast region. From Spain to western Siberia. They left traces everywhere. Each point indicates a site where finds have been discovered. The most famous one is located in Neanderthal in Germany. It was here that the world's first Neanderthal was discovered. Ralf Schmitz is determined to find the rest and excavates the legendary spot 150 years later. The greatest adventure in his career. It gets really interesting once we enter this area. The actual area of excavation lies a few meters under the surface. It's protected by several layers. 20 meters above us was the grotto where the original Neanderthal bones were found. The rock face and cave were totally destroyed by the extraction of lime. The sediment from the cave must have landed at the bottom of the valley in the 19th century. The chance of still finding original Neanderthal bones depended entirely on whether the earth from the caves had been transported out of the valley in 1856 or not. A scrapyard covers the area they want to excavate. However, despite the obstacles, work begins in Neanderthal in the autumn of 1997. Had the researchers really selected the right place? Weeks go by without any significant find. Sackfuls of earth are cleared away one by one and sifted by hand. Not even the tiniest particle should be overlooked. Laborious work. Shortly before the end of excavations, there is a shimmer of hope. A piece of bone. Is it a bone from a human being? We cleaned this cheekbone and it became evident that it wasn't just any old piece of bone, but a human cheekbone. We compared it with a plastic modern human skull and saw that the bone we just found was larger. And it was immediately clear that this is a Neanderthal cheekbone. Bone for bone, the skeleton was completed. 50 further fragments are added. From the cheekbone, we can guess how the first European might have looked. It is like a jigsaw puzzle. The most important ones are those which fit the original skeleton. And the very first one that we try is a small fragment from the left thigh bone. If you look at this thigh bone near the knee joint, you can see that tiny pieces are missing. This happened as the laborers at the quarry struck the bones in the earth with their spades. A great moment in the history of archaeology was the moment when the bones made click. I felt sick with excitement. I almost fainted because this was of such importance. This would finally prove that we had rediscovered the original site in the Neanderthal. The key to cracking the Neanderthal code is in Leipzig. A team of international scientists led by Svante Päbel has developed revolutionary techniques to sequence ancient DNA. We worked on animals, cave-dwelling bears, mammoths, etc., for a long time. And then, when we realized that it functioned, we tried to get hold of Neanderthal bones. And then we finally got support from Ralf. Ralf Schmitz, the custodian of the original Neanderthal, placed an upper arm bone at their disposal. From this, specimens were taken. Meal was drilled out of the bone and examined. Would the extract contain enough genetic material to crack the Neanderthal genetic code? It would be a stroke of luck after 40,000 years. It is, of course, always important that DNA has been preserved in such a bone. Only 10% of the bones that we examine actually contain DNA. The chances are good, because the Neanderthal upper arm is not only well-preserved, but also unusually well-developed. What is the reason for this? In his youth, this man suffered a fracture in the joint of the elbow. For the rest of his life, he was very restricted in the use of his left arm. He was to a certain extent disabled. This can be clearly seen because the left upper arm is decidedly thinner than the right one. If I lay them side by side, you can compare them yourself. As a disabled person, he was taken care of by his group for 20 years. This says more about Neanderthals than 10 million stone tools would. Neanderthals were not only brave hunters, but also caring human beings. Wounds and broken bones were a fact of daily life. They took care of each other in the tribe, because survival depended on each and every member. They were able to take care of serious injuries. That means that Neanderthals must have had basic medical knowledge. The daily search for food, a dangerous business. Some people have compared that with the pattern of injuries and fractures that we find on rodeo riders, you know, and it's quite the same, actually. So it looks that they are really, you know, physically confronting these animals. There is also a rather high mortality of adults, and so this is also probably a key factor of the demography of the Neanderthals, the high risk of dying young. Neanderthals had little chance of reaching their 40th year of life. Their final resting place was always a cave. The tribe made sure that the body was protected from carrion-eating animals. They laid out their dead on their back or sometimes curled up on their side in a position almost like for sleep. We don't know whether they believed in gods or an afterlife. There are some indications of burial rituals and cults of the dead, but it isn't possible to be more specific after 10,000 years. One thing is clear, however. These were human beings, and they mourned their dead. The question now is how different, how much difference they are, and what kind of differences. And to have a replacement of one species by another, you don't need a big difference between the two species. The team in Leipzig hopes to answer a lot of questions by decoding the Neanderthal genome. Why did they become extinct, and why did modern humans survive? The attempt to extract the genetic sequence from a bone specimen of the original Neanderthal is successful. It is the first from an extinct human. In my opinion, our great interest in the Neanderthal genome is not foremost the Neanderthals themselves, but our own history, that of modern man, because the Neanderthal is our closest relation. Then, the setbacks. There isn't enough material from the original Neanderthal to go on, and other bones are contaminated. When working with Neanderthal DNA, the greatest problem we have is human contamination. Humans and Neanderthal are very closely related. This means that if I contaminate the DNA from the bone extract with human DNA, I can no longer differentiate between the two. The bones pass through many hands, and each one leaves traces behind. For the geneticists, this seems at first to be an unsolvable problem. The search for uncontaminated bones begins, Europe-wide. We examined a lot of bones, only to find perhaps five which had enough DNA and little contamination, making them suitable for the project. The gene hunters find what they are looking for in Croatia. The trail leads to Zagreb, to the time-honored Academy of Arts and Sciences. Johannes calls it at the very place where lies the key to cracking the Neanderthal code. Safe in a glass cabinet, the precious fossil lay unrecognized in a dusty drawer for decades, until the team from Leipzig arrived on the scene. We carried out a genetic analysis of the bones and found Neanderthal DNA in a lot of them. This means that we were able to get DNA from all the bones that you see here. So the Neanderthal DNA has been preserved for thousands of years, and we examined these bones to see if they were suitable for the project. They are. One of the bones contains a lot of information. The researchers talk about a golden bone. It has proved to be the most suitable. It's only very slightly contaminated by human DNA in comparison with the other bones. In this box here, we have the bones which gave us the key to the Neanderthal genome. On the way to the site where the bones were found. It is 30 kilometers north of Zagreb, in a dense forest. Accompanied by two Croatian colleagues, Johannes Krause pays a visit to the Vindija cave, one of the most important Neanderthal sites in Europe. Generation after generation of Neanderthal lived in this cave, until they became extinct. It's a site where we have some of the youngest Neanderthals ever to be found. Certainly the youngest Neanderthals anywhere in this part of Europe. And they lived at a very interesting time, what is often referred to as the biocultural change, or switch from the middle to the upper Paleolithic. Roughly a period between 40 and 30,000 years ago. And this is the time where you already have some groups of anatomically modern people, people like us, living in some parts of Europe. This cave was extremely popular with prehistoric humans. 13 layers of finds are discovered. Most of them containing remains of Neanderthals. I think it's wonderful just to imagine that Neanderthals once lived here in this cave. We are standing in the very place where another form of human lived and found shelter 30,000 years ago. It's an amazing feeling to know that Neanderthals very definitely lived here, and left their bones, however they may have come to be here. It could be that it was hyenas that dragged them in. The researchers reached the innermost part of the cave. It could have happened here. Neanderthals and modern humans encountered each other. Did they mix? Some people believe that this can be read in the bones. There are people who believe that Neanderthals were interbreeding with some groups of anatomically modern humans when they first came into Europe. There's also a possibility of even older contacts with various other groups of people, certainly. So it is a question whether we can see this in the gracility or some morphological features of Vindhya, which is a question that we often refer to when we study these fossil bones. There is much speculation about the bones. It could have happened in the area around Vindhya. The first rendezvous between Neanderthals and modern humans. But genetic researchers say nothing like this could have happened in Croatia. If there had really been extensive mixing in Europe between Neanderthals and modern humans, then there should actually be more DNA in Europeans today than in Asians today, and that is not the case. We find the same Neanderthal DNA in Europe as in Asia and Southeast Asia. Back in Leipzig, the bones from Vindhya advance the sequencing of the Neanderthal genetic code. With their help, the researchers even hope to be able to read the whole genome. To be able to understand the message from the Stone Age, it is not enough to examine the genes from prehistoric man alone. To understand more, for example, about their ability to speak, a comparison is needed between our extinct closest relative, the Neanderthal, and our closest relative alive, the chimpanzee. The great apes share 99% of their genes with us. Six million years of evolution separate us, and in these six million years, both chimpanzees and humans have accumulated about 20 million genetic mutations. And this altogether makes this difference of roughly 1%, so we are indeed very closely related. But apes can't speak. The geneticist Wolfgang Enert is carrying out research on the chimpanzees at the zoo in Leipzig. When a gene for language was discovered in England in 2001, Enert recognized it was missing in apes. Could it really be one of the genes for language which made such a crucial difference between us and our closest relative in the animal world? The difficulty that we have when we have one gene by the scruff of the neck, where we think that something really very important happened in human evolution, which of course we can't examine directly. We can't change this gene directly in humans or chimpanzees, so we have to have some kind of experimental access to it. For example, over the most important model organism which we have, and that is the mouse. In the mouse, we can try out what makes the diverse variations of the gene different. And in the end, a mouse is also very, very similar to us. Wolfgang Enert wants to know what happens when a language gene is implanted in a mouse. It's true that the mice do not begin to speak, but they do change, and very distinctly. We're one step further and say, okay, this change somehow affects the mouse's brain in such a way that we think we can relate it to certain language-relevant characteristics. And we examine it further in order to define it more exactly. But we've taken the first step. It does something to the nerve cells and to areas of the brain which are responsible for human language. The ability to speak is a quality which stands out in human beings. The mouse model proves that the newly discovered language gene must play an important role in speaking. While Wolfgang Enert is investigating the rodent's squeaks, the team around Svante Pavel finds the very same gene in the Neanderthal. Indeed, the mouse really does squeak a little differently, and there are changes in the brain. These are certainly important, and it's these that we shared with Neanderthals. The first part of the Neanderthal code has been correct. It was cutting-edge technology which made the final breakthrough possible. This technology has made it possible to determine 100 million DNA sequences at one time. This is one million times more than could be determined with this older machine, and so we were able to produce as much data as we needed to decode the Neanderthal genome. Finally, after 13 years of scientific work, it has been achieved. The Neanderthal genome has been decoded. The result is sensational. They mixed a little, and there is a little of the Neanderthal in us. But how much? To answer this question, the researchers also examine modern humans. They compare the Neanderthal gene with a genotype of men and women from five different parts of the world. The result is a further surprise. The distribution of the Neanderthal inheritance varies throughout the world. The most astonishing thing about the results is that we find this small contribution in Europeans and Asians, but not in Africans. It seems to be something that Europeans and Asians have in common, a small part of the Neanderthal genome. This is a revolution. Up to now, there was the opinion we were totally different from the Neanderthal. The great mystery. How could it be that Neanderthals contributed to areas of the world which were never inhabited by Neanderthals? And the most probable theory is that it happened very early. This mixing with Neanderthals, ancestors of the Neanderthals from Croatia who we examined. The most likely area for this is the Middle East. It begins in Africa 500,000 years ago. Early hominids separate into different lines. The ancestors of anatomical modern human and the ancestors of the Neanderthal. The early Neanderthals migrate, settle to the east and spread across the whole of Europe. 150,000 years before our time, modern humans also migrate from Africa and mate with Neanderthals. On their triumphal march across the world, they carry a tiny little part of Neanderthal DNA in their genetic pack. They spread it to regions never inhabited by Neanderthals. To put it in a nutshell, Neanderthals are indeed our ancestors. We are family. Neanderthals are us and I think it's wonderful that something remains of these fascinating ice age hunters. 28,000 years before our time, Neanderthals disappear. Humans carrying their genes return to Africa. It is only south of the Sahara that Neanderthal DNA is not found. I would like to think that the general public would be pleased to know that we have a little bit of Neanderthal in us. They were tough people. They were durable people. They lived in very tough circumstances. They survived for hundreds of thousands of years. I would be very proud to know that I have Neanderthals among my ancestors. We have a lot of things in common with the Neanderthals. For example, excavations across Europe have revealed that, like us, prehistoric humans decorated themselves with color made from clay. And yet, they were different. In what ways are we different? What makes us so unique? A good example is why Neanderthals didn't produce any works of art. I still can't explain that Neanderthals were equals in all areas of life, except that they didn't produce any art. Modern humans are the first to bring art to Europe 40,000 years ago. Can this difference be identified genetically? In a clean room, Johannes Krause makes a Neanderthal gene sequence visible to the human eye. By cracking the Neanderthal code, researchers now hope to be able to uncover humanity's last remaining secrets. We can go beyond questions of gene flow and who was having sex with whom in the Pleistocene. We can go on to questions of biology, behavior, adaptation. And maybe from this, we can get a better handle on what it might have been in terms of modern human biology that made that pattern, that modern human biological pattern, ultimately become the more successful one. Modern humans are successful because they can communicate better. Over thousands of years, the Neanderthals hardly changed at all. But we are flexible. We can guess what another person is thinking. We can think in symbols. But we are also aggressive and do not give space to other species, nor to other human beings. With the Neanderthal code, we now have a key to some of the most important questions about ourselves. To compare to no more could be even important to understand and solve problems of the future of mankind. The real mystery is why one species, our species, was so successful? Why this species is so invading? How it managed to cover all the planet and be so successful and so numerous? The Neanderthals were incredibly skilled in so many ways. They survived for thousands of years in the harshest of conditions, putting up with swings in climate and ice ages. They could cope with nature until something happened that they were not prepared for. To think that a natural cause would lead to the extinction of the Neanderthal just at the time when modern humans would move into Europe, after two or three hundred thousand years, of this kind of, you know, up and down in the population, would be an incredible coincidence. That it happened just at the time when modern humans are coming. It's the beginning of the end when modern humans appear in the land of the Neanderthals, 40,000 years ago. They replace the Neanderthals in their hunting grounds. They reproduce much faster. The number of prehistoric people diminishes. They are driven back to the boundaries of their original homeland. Their culture is lost forever. Their craftsmanship, their skills in hunting, their solidarity in the tribe is doomed. But today, we know more than we have ever known about our extinct brothers. This painting, this Neanderthal puzzle gets more and more colorful. They will keep us supplied with very interesting material for at least 50, if not 100 years. The Neanderthals disappeared from Earth nearly 30,000 years ago. We modern humans dominate the planet now. Alone. But a little of the Neanderthal has survived. In each of us. Even till today.