Before Neanderthals Went Extinct: We Shaped Our Culture Together

SPEAKER_01 0:00 For most of history, we've told ourselves the same story. That we became human alone, that we learned to think on our own. And the Neanderthals? They were cast as the failure, the evolutionary dead end, the other humans who simply disappeared while we survived.

SPEAKER_00 0:18 But what if that story is completely wrong? What if we didn't become intelligent by ourselves? Because new research suggests that when Homo sapiens met Neanderthals, we may not have just shared land or even children. We may have shared ideas, tools, skills, and even ways of thinking.

SPEAKER_01 0:37 In other words, what if part of what makes us human isn't entirely ours? This is what we did before.

SPEAKER_00 0:45 I'm Olli. And I'm Matt. And today we'll be exploring what we did before we were the last human species left. A time when the Neanderthals walked among us. Now, Ollie, we've understood Neanderthals to be many different things. The author, Danny Vendromini, for instance, explores a very violent side of this human subspecies in his book Them and Us.

SPEAKER_01 1:10 Yeah, he kind of paints them as these brutish monsters, right? So the view, the vision that he gives of them is this like terrifying apex predator that hunted Homo sapiens. And the argument goes that aspects of our evolution actually were shaped by this predation, by this long-term pressure that was put on us from the Anderthals.

SPEAKER_00 1:33 Yeah, but it's quite controversial, right? Yeah. Mainstream paleoanthropology generally does not accept that quite extreme framing. And actually a lot of modern research has kind of moved the other way towards actually seeing Neanderthals as sophisticated humans with their own culture.

SPEAKER_01 1:53 Yeah, exactly. And it's become quite common understanding now, I think, that many of us still have Neanderthal DNA in us. It could be as much as 4% by some estimates, but maybe as low as 1%. It kind of depends where you're from, and I guess you need some genetic testing to figure out exactly. But an individual person, you know, might only carry this very small percentage. But you know, if you if you combine that across all living humans, we've actually preserved around 20% of the entire Neanderthal genome in scattered fragments. Um, so it's quite amazing how connected we really were with the Neanderthals. And there's even a suggestion that um certain Neanderthal gene variants are associated with uh altered risks for conditions like depression, uh nicotine addiction, and even like how sensitive you are to pain. Well, yeah, um I'm assuming they weren't smoking, I don't know. But is it No, but the idea is that um evolutionary traits which would have been ad advantageous for them in the distant past have been carried over and actually aren't so advantageous for us now.

SPEAKER_00 3:00 Right, okay. You're just predisposed to maybe like a really strong reward mechanism making you like obsessed with something or whatever. Okay. And you can totally see that in the natural world that's an advantage if that means like getting food or uh something else, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:18 Yeah, exactly. If you're like obsessed with um uh knowing the uh whereabouts of like the nearest lion or something, that could be really really helpful, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:27 Yeah, addicted to finding lions. It's the earliest addiction. Yeah, it's other than smoking. Yeah. So our Neanderthal um ancestors would probably be upset to see those genes used in that way. How dare you use my genes like that? Yeah. But um, all of this to say because we're carrying these genes, that means there must have been plenty of interbreeding with Homo sapiens. Um before we were the only humans left on Earth, we kind of have to wonder: were we kind to each other? Were we like warring with them? Uh were we driving them out of places? Uh and did they fight us uh for territory or food or anything, or did we kind of live together co harmon harmoniously? So uh it could be that the interbreeding obviously was forced, we don't know. Um it could have been during raids or attacks. Uh looking at DNA evidence, some researchers have suggested many of these pairings may have involved male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens rather than the other way round.

SPEAKER_01 4:43 Yeah, so it seems to be, and and this is not definitely conclusive, but that it was almost always male Neanderthal, female Homo sapien. And this has led to some darker questions about what some of those encounters may have looked like. But as you imagine, we're trying to get clues about a time more than 40,000 years ago. So it's not really easy to determine. Maybe it was that we coexisted peacefully and that's why relationships formed. And the genetic evidence being inconclusive means that um it is possible it's not quite as cut and dry as that it was male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens. It could there could have been some uh relationships the other way around. But it is pretty clear now, uh, given all this, that we did at least coexist with them. So sites across the Levant, Europe and Western Asia show overlapping occupation windows between roughly 50,000 and 40,000 years ago. And especially important is the Levant, places like modern Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, because it acted like a corridor between Africa and Eurasia. And this is where both species appear in alternating and sometimes overlapping archaeological layers, and that alone tells us that they weren't separated by continents, they were neighbours.

SPEAKER_00 6:02 Yeah, and the interbreeding that we mentioned before is obviously a good example of this. Uh, we know at the very least they were living in the same areas. But it turns out Neanderthals may have also interbred with other human species, namely the Denisovans. In 2018, uh scientists found the remains of a teenage girl in Denisova Cave in Siberia, and they nicknamed her Denny, and her mother was a Neanderthal, and her father was a Denisovan.

SPEAKER_01 6:35 Okay, so if they were interbreeding with Denisovans and then also into breeding with us, does that mean we also have some of that Denisovin DNA transferred to us?

SPEAKER_00 6:46 Yes, uh yes, we do. And um, depending again, as you said before, on like where you are, the rates are different. In some populations, actually, there is more Denisovin DNA than Neanderthal DNA. The highest levels are actually usually found in Melanesian populations, where people actually can carry somewhere between 3 to 6% Denisovin DNA. And by comparison, Neanderthal DNA in most non-African populations is usually about 1 to 2, 2.5%.

SPEAKER_01 7:20 Yeah, so we were probably also just interbreeding with Denisovans themselves, not just with Neanderthals who would also, you know, like cross species. Um so there was really ancient humans were sort of interbreeding all over the place. Um it's mad to think that because I think you know, we've known about Neanderthals for well, for ages. I mean, as long as we've been alive, right? Um but until last year we didn't even know what Denisovans look like. And yet some populations have more DNA uh in them than they have Neanderthals. You know, for years scientists had just a finger bone, a few teeth, part of a jawbone, some bone fragments.

SPEAKER_00 7:58 Yeah, from the this tiny amount of material, they could determine from the DNA that they were actually a distinct human group who interbred with both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

SPEAKER_01 8:11 Yeah, it's amazing that you only need those few little fragments to extract the DNA to find out that we have this ancient ancestor that we had had no other uh sign of really, no other major uh skeletons or archaeological finds, except for the fact that we do now have a skull of a Denisovin. So, well, in 2025 researchers determined that the um the famous dragon's dragon man skull, which is the Harbin cranium from China, is almost certainly Denisovan, making it the first confirmed Denisovan skull and by far the most complete Denisovan fossil we've ever had.

SPEAKER_00 8:52 And this uh Harbin cranium was the skull that was found in the 1930s in China, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 9:00 Yeah, uh so the story goes that um a local labourer found this skull at at the riverbank of Shongua River. So um he realised that it was um potentially important, so he hid it in an abandoned well rather than handing it over to uh authorities. And then after World War II, he kept it secret because he didn't want to reveal his past work for the Japanese Aligned Administration. Um, so there was this this sort of political reason why he just never divulged the location of this skull that he had hidden. So it actually stayed hidden for so many years, so from 1933 all the way until 2018, and it and then his family recovered it and his grandson donated it for study. Some researchers uh actually later question this story and suspect the grandson may have actually found the skull himself. Oh, okay. Yeah, but just made the story up to make it sound cooler. But but even so, um, its origin in the Harbin region isn't uh disputed. So it is still accepted that this is an ancient human skull. Right, okay, it's not 3D printed or something. Uh I think archaeologists are quite well trained to figure that out these days.

SPEAKER_00 10:19 No, well, if that story is true, it's amazing that um politics and you know one man's fear of authorities and things would have restricted kind of advancement in research of this for so long. But when they did find it, the skull sort of showed um quite quite a large uh brow ridge, and this gave evidence, didn't it, that well, just generally from researching their skull, that they were the Denisovans were big bodies, they had these big brow ridges and a very broad face. They had large noses, they had a brain size that was comparable to modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as well, and also a sort of a flatter face than in some respects was kind of expected.

SPEAKER_01 11:11 Yeah, and I don't know um if it's like definitive evidence that it's a Denisovan skull, but this is probably as close as we've ever gotten. Um so it's very cool. But uh, we could go off on a massive tangent just about the Denisovans. So let's bring it back to what life was like when we used to mix with Neanderthals specifically, because it this is where it gets really interesting. So I read a recent paper in Nature showing that we didn't just coexist with Neanderthals, we actually shared knowledge with them. So we thought together. Um, so this this is evidence that comes from Tinshamath Cave in Israel, which is a really important cave for archaeological finds on Neanderthals, which may suggest that we shared many of the same behavioural practices as our Neanderthal cousins. And um the findings show that this would have happened between 130,000 and 80,000 years ago. So evidence from that period suggests that we may have had this like repeated contact across tens of thousands of years.

SPEAKER_00 12:15 Yeah, it's it's I suppose it's the thing is we we know that there's a difference now with the technology and the research that we have, but if you're a human, you know, 100,000 years ago, whether you're a Homo sapien or a Neanderthal, surely do you see them as different? Or do you just think that they look different like all humans kind of do? Uh maybe that might be part of it. I don't know, that it's just like, well, we're we all look like hominids, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:42 So that's true, because we have much of the same anatomy, obviously. Um, and we weren't doing DNA tracing back then.

SPEAKER_00 12:52 No.

SPEAKER_01 12:53 Uh and so to meet somebody with a slightly flatter face and a bigger nose than you, I mean, that's common today.

SPEAKER_00 13:00 Well, yeah, exactly. Everyone's different, so it's probably just like, oh yeah, that's Dave. He's just a bit flat-faced. Yeah. Flat-faced Dave. Yeah, yeah. Oh, good old Dave. Uh but yeah, this this is interesting, this general idea, right? But I mean, you're talking about 130,000 to 80,000 years ago as a sort of period. That's a very long time for us to kind of be working and sharing ideas. It it must have shaped our cultural evolution as a s as a species.

SPEAKER_01 13:36 Yeah, I don't know if it's clear that we were sharing ideas for the entire span of that what 50,000 year period, but there at least are tens of thousands of years in there which where it's possible that we were. And yeah, you can imagine that it really made a difference to how we eventually turned out.

SPEAKER_00 13:54 Yeah, and and that's odd because I guess the story often goes that Homo sapiens kind of drove Neanderthals out of their natural environments, and that that we drove them to extinction. But actually, it kind of sounds like we were coexisting a bit and working together.

SPEAKER_01 14:16 Yeah, and I wonder if there was a mixture of the two things, you know, because again, humans, Homo sapiens don't get on with each other. We do a lot of collaboration, and then we also wage a lot of wars. So maybe the two can be same, you know, true at the same time. So uh researchers actually looked at various bits of evidence from this region where the cave is, and and they call it a melting pot of human activity, uh, which is so cool. But they they basically looked across four areas so um stone tool production, hunting strategies, symbolic behaviour, and social complexity. And what they found was that they called it behavioral uniformity. So this is the idea that these groups were starting to look culturally quite similar because they were in this sort of ongoing contact with one another.

SPEAKER_00 16:04 Okay, so um the first sort of point that you mentioned was stone tools. So what did they find there?

SPEAKER_01 16:11 Yeah, well, it seems that both groups were using these the sophisticated stone tool technology, um, the Laval method, basically, um, where you carefully prepare a stone core so that a single strike produces a sharp, predictable flake.

SPEAKER_00 16:28 So this wasn't just kind of random smashing.

SPEAKER_01 16:32 No, um it this method requires planning, it requires teaching and like shared technical knowledge. And at Tinshameth, the researchers argued that these similarities are best explained not by complete isolation, but by knowledge transmission between groups. In other words, if one group discovered a better way to shape a hunting point, for instance, that idea would spread. Um, and skills seem to have been moving between populations.

SPEAKER_00 17:00 I wonder, though, if um that's evidence of collaboration. I mean, I'm no historian really, uh no expert, but um or if it could be that certain people were learning, you know, like we do today from it seeing other groups doing it, but it doesn't necessarily mean, you know, it's like, oh, I just I've seen that those people are doing this thing. I don't know. It's just a interesting thought.

SPEAKER_01 17:25 Yeah, I guess you know, some people um think it's quite weird that all over the world at very similar time periods, humans started building pyramids um without any sort of uh at least not knowing that there was a connection between the groups who were doing it, um, because they were in you know completely different regions of the world. So maybe skill transfer happens in a in a way that we don't quite understand yet. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 17:54 Yeah, possibly. Um there's there's that, right? And migration and things happening independently. And if we look in the modern era, you know, I don't know, the space race or nuclear uh bomb research, all of this kind of you know, it's not like the Russians and the Americans were working together, but they obviously learned from each other still. Um and they figured it out roughly at the same time, yeah. As a result of learning from what the other people were doing, I think, you know, the counterintelligence and things.

SPEAKER_01 18:27 So yeah, because you can almost draw um explanations out of what you see visually, like maybe if uh Neanderthal saw that there was a sharper point uh on a stone tool and it was more effective, perhaps it had been dropped by a Homo sapien for for example, they could say, uh, you know, ah, we could fashion ours to look the same and and have uh better outcome without actually having to connect with humans. Um but I like the idea that we all working together.

SPEAKER_00 18:57 Yeah, yeah. And and to be clear, this is us just uh theorizing and having a chat, right? Um we're not suggesting that Neanderthal's and humans were like the USSR against the US. And actually, I I I like and also the evidence that we've been reading uh suggests that people may have been working together, and I like that story a bit more. Um so going, you know, we were talking about stone tools, but do we see the same patterns appear in in hunting as well?

SPEAKER_01 19:31 Yeah, so um the cave actually contains the remains of large game animals, so aurochs, horses, and deer. Umrochs are like the ancestor of of of cattle, of cows and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 19:44 Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 19:45 And it suggests that these populations were um exploiting similar prey and maybe maybe moving through the same ecological zones. And, you know, rather than occupying separate worlds with different lifestyles, it seems that they were hunting the same animals slightly along the same routes in the same valleys and water systems. So you can imagine that if two human groups depend on the same landscape for survival over thousands of years, they've got to bump into each other quite a lot, right? It would be highly unlikely that they just completely missed each other.

SPEAKER_00 20:19 Yeah, I mean, the populations were significantly lower than today, but if they're in the same area and doing the same things, then yes, absolutely. I'm sure they would have come across each other or at least evidence of each other. And then obviously that's kind of like, well, now we need to find those people. Yeah, and they look like us, maybe we can mate with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's that's the optimistic view of what they'd think. Uh, because I think it would be probably potentially more fear and oh we need to Yeah. But you never know. Um But but going back to what we were talking about, so there's this bit which which fascinates me. Um perhaps the strongest evidence comes from how they actually treated their their dead, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:10 Yeah, so Tinshamath Cave contains several human burials. Um so it's actually that the first mid-middle Paleolithic burials discovered in more than 50 years. Some bodies were placed in fetal position, and you know, next to them they had ochre and stone tools and animal bones. And this matters because formal burial customs begin appearing in the Levant around 110,000 years ago, among the earliest anywhere in the world, and they're not confined to just one species. Uh so if you know, if they're just emerging in this region and then suddenly loads of species are practicing it, it suggests something quite profound that this symbolic behaviour, this ritual, social meaning, that they weren't isolated inventions, that they may have spread and intensified through contact, through people seeing others doing it. So burial may have become uh more formal precisely because different groups were interacting more often and sharing these practices together and defining identity through those interactions.

SPEAKER_00 22:21 That's very interesting. Um, because it's not so much like maybe the ritual aspect you could argue could be debated, but it's it's that isn't necessarily the point. It's the point that this was being shared or these practices were happening around the same time amongst different people. And the ochre on the kind of ritual aspect is especially revealing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 22:46 It is because um so ochre is a natural clay earth pigment, and large quantities of mineral pigments like this were found in the cave, especially red ochre, which may have been used for body decoration as well as. Burial ritual. And okre, well, it has no practical hunting function here, so it it likely means that it's something symbolic instead. Some argued there are some functional uses for okre, but it does strongly suggest people were marking bodies, uh, creating identities, perhaps even distinguishing uh group membership.

SPEAKER_00 23:23 Okay, so the researchers are arguing that this may reflect kind of increasingly complex social lives where appearance and ritual mattered because I guess like social boundaries mattered.

SPEAKER_01 23:39 Yeah. In a region where you've got multiple human groups constantly meeting, identity itself actually could have become quite important. Um and uh and on the subject of burial, that's a whole other amazing discussion to be had. I'm actually speaking to Professor Barry Malloy for an episode soon about a recent paper he co-authored looking at the various ways Bronze Age people treated their dead. And it's hugely interesting. So uh look out for that. But that's a story for another time.

SPEAKER_00 24:11 Yeah, yeah, but we could go into a long uh tangent on that one. So putting this all together, it really leads to the biggest implication of the paper, right?

SPEAKER_01 24:23 Yeah, so the authors argue that these interactions created what they call gradual cultural homogenization. Not one species teaching the other in a sort of one-way direction, but repeated exchanges that slowly made different populations more alike. So you've got technologies spreading, rituals spreading as well, uh, as well as social practices as well. So innovation didn't happen in isolation, it happened through contact. And Professor Yossi Zedner from the paper puts it quite bluntly. He says human connections and population interactions were fundamental in driving cultural and technological innovations. And that kind of changes the story completely. It does. Um, instead of Homo sapiens becoming modern all by ourselves, the Levant starts to look like a shared workshop of human evolution. Intelligence, symbolism, social complexity may not have been built inside one isolated species and then carried outward. They may have been shaped in conversation across species lines.

SPEAKER_00 25:30 Which means part of what made us human may not have been invented by us alone. It may have emerged because for thousands of years we were not alone. Yeah. It's I should maybe just caveat that saying us is maybe misrepresentative, because we we are part Neanderthals. We are them. So we shouldn't consider it as an us and them thing. But um but but hang on, if we're if we're talking about sharing ideas, could Neanderthals actually sp speak?

SPEAKER_01 26:02 Yeah, I did look into this, um, and there is some interesting papers on this subject too. It is still debated, but the answer is increasingly looking like a yes, at least in some form or another. So they had similar vocal anatomy. Uh, they could control the use of fire, they could coordinate hunting, and even they they had the genetic hardware linked to language, like the Fox P2 gene. So um the old idea that they were like silent, grunting cavemen might not hold up anymore.

SPEAKER_00 26:37 Okay, so my question is if we worked harmoniously with Neanderthals, which is still disputed, but if we did, what what happened to them?

SPEAKER_01 26:48 Yeah, because if the old narrative of the fact that we just like drove them out or hunted them to extinction or whatever we think we did isn't true, why would they have died out? And we did tackle this question on a recent episode of the New Scientist podcast, which is one that I produce, and basically the idea presented there was it's thought that after a period of cooling climate around 75,000 years ago, the Neanderthal population was decimated, it couldn't deal with the rapid cooling. Then the earth did warm up again, but by the time the climate had warmed, they'd lost a lot of their genetic diversity. And if you lose your genetic diversity as a species, it makes you much more vulnerable to basically being wiped out. And so the species just eventually collapsed over time. I mean, it it wasn't the only reason, but it does appear to be a large factor for what eventually sort of killed off the the Neanderthals. Um, but if you want to dig deeper into this topic, I highly recommend going over to the New Scientist Podcast and having a listen. It's a really, really great chat.

SPEAKER_00 27:59 Yeah, um, and this is one of these topics that I think there's quite a lot of conflicting or just misinformation or things that you're told as a kid. Like I think I remember being told that Neanderthals, you know, they couldn't use tools like us and they couldn't throw spears, so that's why we just out hunted them and they just you know, but actually there's evidence that says that actually they could throw spears quite well. Um so it's like, well, okay, that I think people are just or were putting their finger up, and and I think a lot of this might be prejudice based on the way that Neanderthals look compared to us. People assume that they're kind of you know closer to uh being like an an ape in a way, and that's just not the case at all.

SPEAKER_01 28:48 Um yeah, you're totally right. There's actually a um a paper that I was looking into for this piece called The Mismeasure of Neanderthals, and it essentially argues that we formed in the Victorian ages, so in the 19th century, we formed this prejudice of Neanderthals as these brutish failures that you know they were this sort of animalistic version of a human that just failed to continue into the modern world. And representations of this kind of brute infiltrated museums at the time, it even infiltrated politics and scientific theory. But now we understand that their place in history was very different, and um I think it maybe teaches us a little something about what it really means to be human.

SPEAKER_00 29:34 Yeah, well, you know, I think the fact that we've come from being maybe more prejudiced to understanding things from a more objective point of view is a common theme uh in our own species, let alone uh and I'm not saying we're perfect on that one, um, but but certainly compared to let's say Victorian times, and it's just a shame that that maybe infiltrated, you know, scientific theory and things like that. And even us growing up have heard things that are sort of mistruths on this. For most of history, we've kind of imagined human evolution like a race, like one species kind of wins, one survives, and one became us. But the the truth is that it didn't really or may not have looked like a race, but more like a a neighborhood.

SPEAKER_01 30:28 Yeah, and actually, um, if we hark back a little bit to our before agriculture episode, maybe we we say, Oh, was life worse or better before agriculture? But may maybe um we have agriculture to thank for us not ending up like the Neanderthals and and not going extinct. It may, maybe it has some drawbacks, but it has at least allowed the human species or the Homo sapien to persist. Although Neanderthals lived for a very, very long time. So when we think of them as a this failed uh species of human, um we have to remember that they lived for hundreds of thousands of years. So that's not a failure. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't consider consider that a failure personally. And I I just really loved this idea that for thousands of years the world wasn't just populated by one kind of human, but a lot. You know, I I like to sort of picture standing in Ice Age Europe or the Levant, for instance, and there's this other figure walking across the valley, which kind of looked almost like you, but not quite. It must have been cool.

SPEAKER_00 31:39 Cool and possibly quite scary. Um I'm just imagining I was in the forest with my partner and dog, um, and it was we were alone uh about a week ago, and we just saw this dog or wolf-like creature in the trees, and we're like, oh god, and it made me think like, Oh, am I gonna see Bigfoot? And like and it is that similar feeling of just being alone and seeing something that's like you can't quite identify it in the distance. Yeah, I think that would be a good idea. Maybe Bigfoot is a is a lost Neanderthals. It's possible. Yeah. Yeah, 100% Neanderthal DNA. Yeah, it's quite ki quite eerie to think about it. Um, and it would be very uncanny, but but back then, actually, I think it would be more like that you might see another family sharing the same river, or another group burying their dead differently, or another kind of mind watching the same fire, and yeah, they're just all subtly or sometimes more obviously different to you. But it brings us, I think, to something deeper. There's this paper by Susan Peters from 2020, which argues that our understanding of Neanderthals is shaped by our need to protect the idea of human uniqueness, what she calls the search for the human spark.

SPEAKER_01 33:10 Yeah, so all these prejudices that we had in in the Victorian age, I guess part of it was because we didn't want to believe that another species roamed the earth which was as intelligent as us.

SPEAKER_00 33:22 Yeah, and again, uh it's it's hard not to maybe mention some things that are provocative here, but I think that it might be counter to you know, evolution was a very unpopular uh theory for a long time, and uh a lot of that is because people do not like to think of us and animals being the same, and they don't they think of humans as being special and being kind of you know placed here by God. So the idea if Neanderthals did exist, well they must be kind of subhuman. I think it is just much easier for people who are struggling with that to justify, I think. And the fact is, maybe we're not as special as we thought. The idea is that we keep trying to find the one thing that does make us special, whether that's language, art, ritual, intelligence, or compassion. And every time that the Andathors are shown to also have that, we kind of move the goalposts. So maybe we're not quite as special as we think. I think that's actually good for us to remember sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 34:30 Yeah, it it totally is because even you know, we're discovering that whales have language and AI is helping us to decode some of it. So yeah, I think human exceptionalism is being challenged on a daily basis, and and maybe that is a good thing. And Matt, before we go, since we've spoken about tools, something I really want to highlight here is a new paper that shows the kinds of tools that Neanderthals were were using. And it turns out they used to hoard rhinoceros teeth. Have we not known this for a while though? Yeah, so we knew that they were hoarding them, but we didn't know why. Why have they just mountains of currency? That's a good good shout. Well, this paper actually suggests um that it could be some form of ancient tool. And as much as I'd like to go into it in detail now, I I'm doing another interview soon with one of the lead authors of that paper, Professor Alicia Sans Royo, and we're going to discuss her findings. It's going to be part of an upcoming episode about what we did before tools, which will also feature a discussion with Dr. Milks, who recently discovered evidence of wooden tools. Yeah, wooden, uh, it seems like they wouldn't work very well, but anyway, wooden tools found in Greece around 430,000 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 35:50 So, yeah, lots of great stuff still to come then. So thank you very much for listening to what we did before. I'm Matt.

SPEAKER_01 35:58 And I'm Ollie. Please subscribe to the show, it helps us out massively. And we will see you next time.