Neanderthals: Meet Your Ancestors

Neanderthals.

We always believed they were just knuckle-dragging ape-men -

that they were the inferior prototype to us, modern humans,

and that about 40,000 years ago, they shuffled off into extinction.

But now, the latest scientific research is showing

that not only were the Neanderthals

much more sophisticated than we thought,

they also didn't completely disappear.

In fact, a part of them still lives on inside us.

Scientists have discovered that most of us - me, him,

most people living today - carry Neanderthal DNA inside of us,

and the only way that could have happened is if somewhere, somehow,

Neanderthals and early modern humans were having children together.

I'm Ella Al-Shamahi.

I study Neanderthals and I want to show you

what these mysterious ancestors of ours were really like.

In the previous episode,

with the help of Hollywood motion-capture guru Andy Serkis,

we reconstructed the fossil evidence to produce what we think is the most

scientifically accurate representation

of a Neanderthal ever made.

We discovered that although Neanderthals

were brilliantly adapted to their ice age environments,

they were also so similar to us that they would fit into today's world

almost unnoticed.

In this programme, we will be asking -

what happened to the Neanderthals?

Why did our species survive while theirs became extinct?

I tend to say they were reasonable. They were not mad.

Modern humans are mad, if you like.

We'll discover the evidence

of the Neanderthals' epic struggle for survival.

For really the first time in the human fossil record,

you see people living through these massive injuries.

And we'll reveal how recent discoveries

have shown that Neanderthal DNA still has a profound impact on us.

It's affecting our skin, it's affecting our immune system,

it's affecting our risk of cancer.

It turns out that studying Neanderthals

isn't just about understanding our distant past.

They also have so much to tell us about our present -

and even our future.

Neanderthals:Meet Your Ancestors

This is the very southern tip of Europe -

the Rock of Gibraltar.

I've come here in search of clues to what might have happened

to the Neanderthals.

We think that this dramatic peak rising out of the Mediterranean

may have been one of the last places that they survived.

At its peak, Neanderthal territory

spread right across western Asia and Europe.

But 45,000 years ago, as the ice ages grew colder,

the European Neanderthals were squeezed

into the warmer southern parts of their range.

Here, there was a milder climate,

plenty of food, and the fossil evidence tells us

that they settled in these caves.

So, who are these people?

These are my friends, Nana and Flint,

the two Gibraltar Neanderthals. Aren't they wonderful?

And they're so lifelike.

Yeah, they're amazing. The little fellow,

he was formerly known as Gibraltar 2,

from the fragments of a skull found in 1926 in an excavation.

I mean, they're such sentient beings when you see them here.

Those expressions, I mean - what are they thinking?

There's that sort of cheeky grin about her.

She's almost looking at you

and seeing right through you and understanding what you're thinking.

And the little fellow's almost, like, holding on,

because he's not sure.

But you know, we talk about Neanderthals and modern humans -

and that already creates a division.

Sadly, from Gibraltar 1, 2 skulls, we have faces and names,

and sadly, you're much closer to them

and they're much closer to you.

Hello, gull.

Archaeologists Clive and Geraldine Finlayson have spent 28 years

excavating the caves

and have discovered that for these Neanderthals, life was pretty good.

In the last 120,000 years,

the average sea level was about 80 metres below our present sea level,

which means that there was a sandy plain out there

and on that sandy plain,

you had red deer, you had horses, you had the forerunners of cattle,

the ibex that were living on the rocks -

these are a kind of mountain goats.

That's what they could add to their diet.

And a little bit further away, there was also a seafood buffet.

The species that we find here in the intertidal

are the species the Neanderthals were collecting

for food, 40, 50, 60,000 years ago.

So here we have these large beds of mussels, goose barnacles,

crabs - just pop round the corner there.

You can see and get a sense of how rich

that intertidal fauna would have been like.

Life in these caves was about as good as it got for the Neanderthals.

On a clear day, they would have been able to see Africa -

just 14 miles across the water,

and you wonder if they had any clue what was coming their way.

And so how close were the modern humans to here?

If we accept the view that modern humans came through the Middle East

and then spread across Europe,

then this would have been one of the last places that they reached.

The evidence suggests that by the time they got here,

the Neanderthals had disappeared.

But of course, there were modern humans on the other side

in North Africa for a very long time,

and all I can say is that if I was sitting here,

and I was a Neanderthal

and I looked there and these people were living there,

I would see the smoke of their campfires rising

and they could see the smoke of my campfires rising,

and knowing what humans are like,

somebody must have tried to get across.

We don't know if this group of Neanderthals in Gibraltar

ever encountered modern humans.

But about 40,000 years ago,

the last of the Neanderthals living here disappeared,

and I want to know what happened to them.

In the last programme,

we did something no-one has ever done before.

In this movie studio, we gathered together

the world's leading Neanderthal experts,

along with Hollywood actor Andy Serkis

and his team of motion-capture artists.

Our mission was to create the most accurate representation

of Neanderthals ever seen.

We want to find out how they behave, how they move,

how they present, how they walk, how they fight.

By gathering together the scientific evidence,

we were able to build computer models of Neanderthals.

I mean, Neanderthals were almost about 20% as wide as they were tall,

somebody who could wrestle you to the ground easily.

Then, through the magic of motion capture,

we were able to animate the models,

converting them into lifelike representations of Neanderthals

in their natural environment.

The ultimate result was Ned.

Based on a real fossil,

we believe he is the most accurate CGI Neanderthal ever created.

Now we have a new challenge for the team.

We want them to help us find out what happened to the Neanderthals.

And once again, we are going to start with Ned.

The version of Ned we brought back to life

showed how he would have looked as a young man in his twenties.

But as I discovered when I met Libby Cowgill

at the Smithsonian in Washington DC,

the evidence from his fossil

can tell us a great deal about Ned's later life.

And it shows that individually, at least,

Neanderthals were great survivors.

This poor guy is sort of the quintessential representation

of a Neanderthal that's had a really hard time.

We know that Ned lived to a ripe old age.

He was probably 40 or 50 when he died,

but he was in terrible shape.

His skull caved in, his right arm withered

and his right hand missing, perhaps amputated.

But none of these were new injuries.

He survived for many years after they were inflicted.

And this tells us something fascinating

about Neanderthal society.

For really the first time in the human fossil record,

you see people living through these massive injuries.

Things like possible amputations, right?

An Australopithecine, an earlier human ancestor,

much more closely related to apes,

would have never have been able to survive

that level of profound injury.

Ned's face was reconstructed by forensic anthropologist Chris Rynn

at the University of Dundee. He's used to working

with the remains of the victims of violent crime.

Initially, he'd ignored the injuries on the skull

to show us Ned as a young man.

But now we've asked him to show us

how he would have looked later in life.

This individual was struck on the left side of the face at a young age

with a heavy blow

that broke his skull, damaged the brain, damaged the orbit.

And then he went on to live for another two decades at least.

So he might have spent his entire adult life

blind in his left eye, with brain damage to this side of his brain.

And you can see on the rest of the skeleton,

it caused probably some kind of paralysis on the contralateral side,

on the right side of his body,

because his right arm and right leg on the skeleton were quite withered.

So this is not someone who could have survived on their own

in that state for their entire adult life.

So this is really strong evidence

that Neanderthals cared for one another

and looked after one another in groups.

I think it's really interesting that Ned is both the stereotype

of the Neanderthal in the sense that this dude has taken a beating...

Right. ..but in another sense, he's completely the opposite

of the stereotype in the sense that he was cared for,

because he would never have made it on his own.

So it needs to be represented on the face, this trauma.

The first thing is, this eye is going to droop slightly.

There's going to be overhang on the eyelids.