Neanderthal Prehistoric Autopsy

Welcome to Prehistoric Autopsy.

We're at the University of Glasgow, our home for the next three nights.

We're going on a journey back through millions of years,

deep into our evolutionary past.

Using just fragmented remains of ancient bones we're going to

recreate the bodies of three of the most iconic

members of our prehistoric family.

We're going to start by rebuilding

one of our closest prehistoric relatives.

A Neanderthal.

We've consulted with leading experts from around the world

to make our reconstruction as accurate as possible.

So this is a record of somebody's life from thousands of years ago.

Exactly.

We'll see evidence of how they hunted.

There's a very interesting

and rather enigmatic puncture mark in the bottom part of this.

And even of cannibalism.

The only reason you'd smash into a femur like this

is to get at that rich fatty marrow inside.

By rebuilding our ancestors, we'll get a unique insight into

how they looked, how they lived and how they compare with us.

And why we ended up alone.

The only human species on the planet.

And at the end of each night we will be coming face to face

with one of our ancient relatives.

So let's go inside and get started.

And this is our base for three nights.

This is where we'll be pulling all of the evidence together.

Up there we've got our laboratory where we'll be doing demonstrations.

And scientists will reveal some of the experiments they're doing

to find out how similar or different our ancient ancestors were to us.

Over there we've got experimental archaeology.

Where our experts are looking for clues into how our ancestors lived.

And over here is palaeoartist Viktor Deak. Hello, Viktor.

Hello. How are you?

He's here to help reveal how you can reconstruct an entire body

from just a few fragments of bone.

For the past six months he's been working with a team of model makers

and using some of the latest research to create

three of our prehistoric ancestors.

And here is where we look at the fossils themselves

and tonight we're looking at a Neanderthal

and asking the question, why are we still here whilst they went extinct?

Well, this is our timeline. Here we are over here, 2012.

Homo sapiens, the only species of human on the planet.

But we don't have to go back very far to find we're sharing

the planet with one other human species.

A tiny creature called Homo floresiensis.

Now, they only died out perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago -

in evolutionary terms, the blink of an eye.

And this is Homo floresiensis

from the island of Flores in Indonesia

and these were really tiny people.

They stood just a metre high, that's less than four foot

and they also had minute brains of about 400ml in size

and yet we know that these little people made stone tools

and they hunted and they were on the planet at the same time as us.

They weren't the only ones,

there was possibly even one other human species, the Denisovans.

About 30,000 years ago.

Here Homo erectus survived as recently as 35,000 years ago

and finally perhaps one of our most successful

and best-known prehistoric relatives, Neanderthal.

They were around until about 30,000 years ago. Now, make no mistake.

Possibly as many as five different species of humans all living on

the planet, in fact, living all over the planet, at the same time as us.

Tonight we're going to recreate perhaps the most famous of them all,

Neanderthal.

And this is our guy. La Ferrassie 1.

Found in a cave in France in 1909, he was alive 70,000 years ago.

We've heard of them

but what were they really like and how did they compare to us?

Who was stronger and above all else

why did we survive while they died out?

Well, to help us answer that question we've got with us tonight

Dr John Hawkes, an anthropologist from the University of Wisconsin

who's been studying Neanderthals for decades.

Yeah, and yet it's always exciting for me to see them

lain out like this where you can see the breadth of evidence that

you get from a single skeleton.

These bones are an incredibly accurate copy of the original

skeleton of La Ferrassie 1.

How do you really know this is a Neanderthal?

It looks vaguely similar to a modern human.

Oh, I don't think so. Look at this.

This is me, this is my skull.

This is my actual skull. Look at that, there's a massive difference.

Yes, you see here's the Neanderthal skull

and if we look at the skull from the side you can see

that this Neanderthal is much longer and lower.

Her skull is much more rounded.

And the thing annoyingly about this specimen that I've observed

straight away is that it's got better teeth than I have.

It's got a lot of teeth and that's absolutely brilliant because

we can actually use that to estimate how old he was when he died.

So, looking at this, we reckon he was about 40 to 55 years old

and we know he was male as well.

If you look at his pelvis you can see this notch,

the greater sciatic notch, and that's really narrow

so that's a good indicator that this is a male skeleton.

And we know how tall he was.

We can use the length of the long bones to reconstruct the height really accurately.

This fella stood about 5'6" tall.

So he was male, 1.6 metres, 5'6" tall, 40 to 50 years old,

so already, from a cursory look at a few bones,

we can start to get an idea of what this particular individual was like.

And our palaeoartist Viktor Deak has been advising our model makers

and building up the skeleton.

Now, there some bits of this skeleton that are missing, Viktor.

So how do we fill in the gaps?

That's right. We're looking at La Ferrassie 1 right now

and this is pretty much what is remaining of him,

although there has been some reconstruction done already.

The reminder of it comes from Kebara Cave in Israel.

And that's the thorax, the ribs and the pelvis and some of the spine.

This is just a virtual skeleton, but a team in America have filled in

some of the missing parts, making a physical model of the skeleton.

We had a copy of that composite skeleton delivered

to our model makers and I went down to meet up with

Jez Gibson-Harris to help put it together.

It's going to form the basis of our reconstruction.

Fantastic. Oh, this is great.

It looks human but it looks a little bit weird.

Right, what do you want to do? Shall we get him onto the stand?

That's a good idea, we can start putting him together.

Both of his legs are going to be slightly bent.

We're not doing him in the kind of boring anatomical position.

We're doing him as a living Neanderthal.

So how's that looking, then?

Does it really look like he's standing on his legs, do you think?

It looks like there's a lot of weight on it.

Yeah, I'd really like to get a bit of external rotation

at this hip joint.

This is fiddly, isn't it, but I think it's worth it,

cos if we get this bit right that's our scaffold done.

And we're ready to start building the muscles on it.

So, John, George, what do you reckon?

-I think it's gorgeous.

-It's a beautiful reconstruction.

And it really gives you the impression of the whole body.

And you can start to see details like the rib cage.

Yeah, he does have this... he has this immense rib cage.

That's a good pair of lungs in there.

-That's right.

-No waist either.

It's amazing, isn't it, because now we've gone from

disarticulated bones laid out on a table

to something that is starting to look like a person.

So where did these Neanderthals come from?

Around 600,000 years ago, it's thought that some of their ancestors,

Homo heidelbergensis, walked out of Africa and headed for Europe,

where they eventually evolved into Neanderthals.

Back in Africa, it's thought that the same species

evolved into Homo sapiens, modern humans.

About 60,000 years ago, modern humans too headed out of Africa.

But what happened when we arrived in Europe,

the home of our evolutionary cousins?

So what's going on when we meet the Neanderthals?

Well, we now have the ability to look at Neanderthal genetics

and, John, this is what you do,

comparing Neanderthal genomes and comparing them with our genomes.

Absolutely.

Two years ago the first complete Neanderthal genome was sequenced.

And now scientists all over Europe are able to extract DNA

from tiny bits of these ancient bones

and reconstruct genomes from them.

In my lab, we're comparing those genomes

with the genomes of living people all over the world.

So is there much of a relationship?

I mean, how close are we to Neanderthals?

It looks like they're a little more different from us

than we are from each other.

They diverged from us in evolutionary terms

something like 300,000 years ago.

So they're a different species?

Well, so then when we do more close comparisons

we find something that's very interesting.

When we look at a chart like this,

we're looking at West African samples

and we've got about 500 people there.

And Northern European samples and I've got about 500 there.

And the further right we are on this graph,

the more similarities people have with Neanderthals.

What this is showing us

is that Northern European samples have substantially more Neanderthal,

about 3% more, than people who live in Africa.

A few weeks ago, George and I sent off saliva samples to be analysed

so our DNA could be compared with the Neanderthal genome,

-so do you have the results of that?

-I do.

I'm slightly nervous about this, I'm not sure why, but I am.

I'm nervous about it.

All of us have a little Neanderthal.

Most people who have ancestry outside Africa

have something like 2% to 3%, so when we look at your DNA...

The question is, is George more Neanderthal than I am?

That's what I want to know.

Well, here's Alice.

And you're really at the low end of the European distribution,

you're about 2.1% Neanderthal,

if we're going to put a yardstick on it.

I don't like the way this is going.

And here's George.

-Knew it.

-George is also on the low end

and I'm going to add myself to this chart because I know myself.

You know, I'm about 2.5%, George, you're about 2.6%,

but by chance we're all sort of on the left side of this distribution.

My wife is 3% and she lords it over me.

And this means that somewhere in my ancestry I've got Neanderthals.

Yeah. It's like if you're tracing your genealogy back in time.

Yes, let's do this, because this is where it gets complicated

because we've actually got this common ancestor.

So if I stick this down here. Homo heidelbergensis.

I'd do this in italics if I could, but I can't.

Homo heidelbergensis. So this is our common ancestor.

And then, OK, we'll have us up here and Neanderthals over here.

So couldn't these differences just be down to the fact that

there's a deep genetic rift here?

Absolutely.

When we look at the Africans that's exactly what we're seeing.

We're seeing the similarities that are retained

from this ancestral population.

And when you have a little bit more it's because you've got genes

that have come straight from that population into you.

So when you're tracing your family tree back,

a small fraction of it goes back into this Neanderthal population.

So it's not just about common ancestors, it's about the fact

that actually Neanderthals and modern humans

have inter-bred with each other.

That's exactly right.

And it's not...3% doesn't sound like much but 3% is the amount of DNA

that you got from one of your great-great-great-grandmothers.

So we know we met and bred with Neanderthals, but ultimately it was

Homo sapiens that ended up as the only human species on the planet.

Yet for hundreds of thousands of years,

Neanderthals were a successful species in a harsh environment.

In the winter it could get as cold as minus 30 degrees Celsius.

But just how tough were they?

When you go to the lumbar column,

to the legs, you can see the power of these joints.

The size of the joint here, the thickness of the leg bone.

The curvature. You know, this guy is bandy-legged and built.

Built for strength.

Some of the other bones are really chunky and robust

and then the one that really stands out for me is the clavicle.

Look at that, the collar bone here is really slender.

You know, this is a powerful strut.

But we see these broken a lot in Neanderthals

and it's an injury-prone lifestyle that they lead.

You know, you're looking at people who dealt with large animals

and that's a dangerous thing to do.

Are there any clues as to how they might have hunted?

Well, this humerus is kind of flattened and...

It's kind of angular.

And I'm going to move over here

because here we've got Dr Colin Shaw from the University of Cambridge.

And you've been looking at just this.

You've been looking at the shape of the shaft of Neanderthal bones

and trying to understand why it's the shape it is.

So what have you been doing with this cast here?

What we do to try and understand the shape

and how it's formed is you essentially just wrap dental putty

around the outside and you can get an exact mould of it.

You scan that and then you can measure properties to understand

how strong the bone is and the shape of it.

So you've done the dental putty, do you think it's ready to cut open?

I think it's quite hard now. Go ahead and cut it off.

Being really careful not to damage the cast.

I mean, I know this is a cast of a Neanderthal bone

but it's still pretty precious.

Off it comes.

And in actual fact, what we've done...

So that's really oval, that's oval.

What you noticed before is absolutely defined by the mould

that we've done and it's very much strengthened anterior posteriorly,

so front to back.

So when you compare that with modern human humeri,

it's a really different shape.

Yeah, most modern humans are much more circular.

So this is a Neanderthal humerus, so that's really oval.

And this is much more circular.

So that's more the modern human version that you see.

So I imagine Neanderthals as being big game hunters,

using spears to hunt their prey down,

could this be from throwing spears?

It's a good question, but probably not.

The reason being is that we know, when you look at throwing athletes,

so particularly cricketers that I've worked with,

and what you see is that the cricketer has a much more circular cross section.

So, literally, if I cut my arm in half and show it to you

this is what you'd see.

You've got muscle, you have fat tissue on the outside and then bone.

And the bone itself is much more circular.

This is interesting because it reflects the fact

that bone changes over the course of our lifetime.

That if we go to the gym, for instance,

and our muscles are building up,

our bones are changing shape on the inside as well.

Absolutely, absolutely you said it all.

What you do to a bone through your lifetime causes adaptation,

if it's strenuous enough and repetitive enough.

The opposite...so you see this nice circular pattern with

the cricketers, the opposite is exactly this.

This is La Ferrassie after we moulded it.

You see the strengthening in this pattern front to back,

anterior-posterior.

Which suggests these bones, these sets of bones,

are adapted to two very different things.

So you think Neanderthals weren't throwing, then?

So from this evidence, no.

So what were they doing then, they have to be hunting?

-What were they doing, stabbing their prey?

-Some people suggest so.

So if Neanderthals are stabbing their prey,

that makes us think of how big that prey might have been

and, George, that's something you've been tackling.

Yeah, it's extraordinary when you think of the size of the prey.

And to find out how they were hunting, earlier this year,

I went to one of the best Neanderthal hunting grounds in the world.

Believe it or not, it's in Thetford Forest in Norfolk,

that's right here on British soil.

At that time large animals like woolly mammoths roamed here.

They stood up to 3.4 metres tall, and weighed around six tonnes.

Neanderthals would have needed to have been skilled hunters

to bring down these massive beasts just by stabbing them.

So how did they do it?

It was not too far from here in 2002 that archaeologists made

an astounding discovery that has been shedding light

on Neanderthal hunting techniques ever since.

An ancient swamp once covered the same spot

as this modern man-made lake.

And it's here that evidence of a Neanderthal hunting ground was found.

Professor Danielle Schreeve has spent the past ten years

researching the site.

60,000 years ago,

it's a predominately open, treeless environment.

So you might have a few stands of pine trees,

some dwarf birch around, but really we are looking at an open grassland.

And one that could support huge herds of animals.

So you've got an open area, large prey. How did they catch it?

With a lot of skill and organisation, I would say.

If you imagine animals coming down to the water to drink,

Neanderthals would have been able to ambush them,

shepherding them into the swampy environment, tiring them out,

then moving in for the kill.

Hunting was the way these people survived.

We're in a relatively high latitude,

a place where they have to hunt to stay alive.

Danielle has been studying the animal bones found here

and has made some startling discoveries.

The bones are kept in the stores of Norfolk Museum.

So, Danielle, what have we got here?

We've got an amazing collection of mammalian bones.

This is the tooth of a woolly mammoth.

Massively heavy.

We've got horse, we've got bison, we've got the reindeer.

How do you tell that they've died at the hands of a hunter

rather than just old age?

This is the bottom part of a femur, the thigh bone, of a horse.

There is a very interesting and rather enigmatic puncture mark

in the bottom part of this.

Now, that's the knee of the horse there

so the angle of that looks like it's been thrust in

behind the knee, at an angle.

In the back of the knee.

That would bring you down.

It's the ideal way to bring down an animal.

And you can see that the top part is broken.

That's been smashed, hasn't it? That's been hammered.

This is something that Neanderthals would have routinely done.

Gone after the marrow cavity to extract bone marrow

because it's even more nutritious and higher in calories than meat.

The signs of injury on many of the bones suggest the hunters

were stabbing their prey at close quarters.

There is an unusual level of quite horrible pathological damage,

disease and trauma on the mammoth bones themselves.

So injured animals who've survived?

In here, we've got two vertebras that have become fused together

because of infection.

We think this is a reflection of these animals surviving

several failed hunting attempts by Neanderthals.

When you think about the kinds of techniques

they would have had to use, up-close hunting,

it's no surprise really that they had to have several goes.

It must have taken a lot of bravery to go in

and stab something the size of a mammoth time and time again.

It's really interesting to see what those Neanderthals were eating

and potentially hunting

and they would have had to be very robust to deal with that.

Oh, absolutely. It's a lifestyle that required incredible strength.

There is something else when we look at these arm bones.

They're different, side to side, they're asymmetrical.

Yeah, when you look at the arm bones you can see really

visually that the right is larger and more robust than the left.

So the question is, what were Neanderthals doing

differently with their right arms compared with their left arms?

George, can you help me out?

Well, there are a couple of things that we can try out

that might offer some clues.

Now, we've got a fine specimen of a hunter here.

Now, Colin, he's wired up onto a machine,

what are we hoping to show with this?

What we're trying to do is test a theory that explains

the asymmetry they were talking about.

You need intensity and you need frequency to cause bone change.

The prevailing theory is that, when you spear thrust,

that back arm, the right arm, provides the majority of the force

and the front is simply steering, somewhat like a snooker...pool cue.

So what we're going to do is measure the muscle activity

during spear thrusting.

The key is that the muscles attach onto the bone

and change their shape.

It's one of the things that influences bone structure.

When our hunter here stabs prey, the electrodes here will be activated.

Well, the muscles will be activated,

it will measure the energy that it produces.

We're going to get him to do

some spearing activities to measure the activity of the muscles,

that might give us clues as to how the bones are being influenced.

OK, so you have to be a really fierce hunter. Grrrr.

We want some serious intensity

because this thing is either your dinner or your death.

So get in a nice stance

and we're going to get you to do three hard stabs.

So go ahead.

Nice and again and out. One more. One more time. Excellent, excellent.

OK, perfect. Have a seat over there.

Now, what we see here exactly is that you'd expect from the theory

that the right has more activity than the left.

What we're seeing is exactly the opposite.

This is the right, this is the left.

So it's completely the other way round.

Yeah, and the reason for that we think is that

it's not simply like playing pool.

It's much more that you have a full body flexing, the hips shift,

the shoulders shift and your arms go right into the target.

The ground reaction force comes back along the spear.

The muscles of the left arm are taking the majority of the load

and as a result they're far more active.

Which is the opposite way for what you'd expect

for explaining what we see on the skeleton over there.

So how come the asymmetrical arm bones,

if the right arm is not doing as much work as the left?

It's a wonderful question. Neanderthals live in a cold climate.

They needed to stay warmer than just their physiology would allow for.

So clothing might have been part of the equation.

To produce a hide, to take something like this, a skin,

and produce a hide that you can construct clothing out of

takes a great deal of processing.

It has to be scraped and cleaned.

You're completely right, it takes approximately eight hours per hide,

of scraping, that's a great deal of scraping.

If you remember, you need intensity

and you need frequency to cause bone change.

How many hides would you need for one suit?

Perfect question. You need five to six,

and each individual needs a new suit per year.

Right, that's a lot of scraping.

John, you're going to be scraping there.

So what we want you to do is grab a stone tool.

This is a side scraper.

These are the type of things that are found

predominately in Neanderthal stone tool assemblages.

So go ahead and give it a scrape for us.

Perfect, and if you keep doing that, I'm going to move over to here.

Again, this is the right shoulder,

this is the activity from the right shoulder.

The one that is active.

If this type of activity is intense enough and frequent enough

to cause bone adaptation, then this could explain what we see.

They would have been doing this for hours and hours and hours.

The explanation is, if one person was doing it for their family,

they could remain busy for half a year of scraping.

It might explain the right side dominance

and the massive asymmetry you see in Neanderthals.

It's very clear. Alice, this might be the answer.

It could be something as mundane as scraping hides all day.

I really love this idea, I love the fact that

we think of Neanderthals as big game hunters

and yet here we are looking at them and saying well, actually,

what's really shaped their bones is not hunting but making clothes.

And Colin's also been doing work looking at how

we can reconstruct muscles based on the size of bones

and we can say that certainly

Neanderthals were much more muscly than us.

And we know from this that they were more muscly in their right arms.

So, Viktor, are you starting to put muscles on?

That's what I'm starting to do. Here we go.

It's early phase.

Oh, he's really chunky.

You're just refining the texture of the muscles there.

Nice big deltoids.

That's one of the muscles that we've been looking at.

That looks fantastic.

When you're reconstructing this, you can't help but think about

all the things they may have done and what affected them.

The more questions you ask yourself in reconstructing this,

the more accurate your final piece will be.

So you can do his muscles virtually

but back in our model-maker's studio they've been having to use

a lot of clay to put the muscles on our life-size Neanderthal model.

And I went down there to lend a hand.

While I've got you here,

you can help me block out, so I can see the extent of the muscles.

That'll give me a guide to the rest of the body. How does that sound?

Using the framework of the skeleton, we began to layer on the muscles.

So this is gluteus medius, and I've just got in the back of my mind

all of the dissections I've done

and the size of the muscles that I've seen in those dissections,

and I'm really going for the thickest, the chunkiest muscles

that I've ever seen when I've been doing human dissection.

Right. That is a great help, actually.

Markings on the bones are a clue

as to how big individual muscles should be.

You can see how prominent this is.

And that is where these muscles are attaching,

so we can see they're on the bone, on the fossil itself,

that there's a very prominent area of muscle attachment.

These must have been nice big chunky muscles.

So we know that we're following the real anatomy.

Neanderthal anatomy may have been well suited to hunting

and preparing skins, but it seems that isn't all they were doing.

In fact, new research is suggesting that the Neanderthals may have been

a little more cultured that we'd previously given them credit for.

Art. It's one of the things that we think of as unique to our species.

But in southern Spain a controversial new discovery

suggests that this may not be the case.

Archaeologist Joao Zilhao believes he has found what may be

one of the first examples of Neanderthal art.

A painted shell from 37,000 years ago.

You can see on this side a pigment, which you can see there and there.

So that orange is a pigment, is it?

This is a paste combining a yellow and red to make a homogenous orange.

So in order to achieve that you would have had to have taken

raw red, raw yellow, mix them together and then apply it?

That's it.

Joao thinks the hole in the middle means it could have been

used as a pendant.

The site is 60km from the sea,

and obviously it did not travel on its own.

Somebody had to carry it all that distance.

These were people that were passing by,

took up shelter perhaps one night, and went on.

One of them was carrying this shell as a pendant probably.

And it broke, and they threw it away,

and we were able to recover half of it.

But why would Neanderthal hunter-gatherers

start wearing symbols like this?

If you only meet people whom you know,

you don't even have to have names for them.

You know who they are.

But if all of a sudden you start getting to deal with strangers

on a frequent basis, people who don't speak your language,

that's where these codes, these symbols kick in.

And you can see even in societies of the present

how body decoration is expressing status.

Who you are, if you are married or unmarried,

if you are from a certain tribe or a different tribe.

So do you think this suggests that Neanderthals were essentially

the same as us culturally, and in their way of thinking?

Definitely. Neanderthals and their modern human contemporaries

were much more alike than we have so far thought.

The idea that Neanderthals had jewellery is contentious.

But in 2011 Joao made a similar discovery

at a prehistoric modern human site he's excavated nearby,

and it raised an even more controversial possibility.

That's lovely.

It was found here at this site

and Enrique there is the man who found it.

-He was digging in the trench.

-Fantastic, what a lovely find.

The similarities of this modern human ornament compared with

the Neanderthal one go way beyond its natural appearance.

The shell is naturally red, but on top of that natural red,

you can see there, there and here between the ribs,

this is the remains of painting.

You can see very well under the microscope.

You will notice the perforation,

so that the shell could be used as an ornament.

-So this shell could have been worn as a pendant?

-Probably.

And it looks as though it's been painted to make it even redder.

Yes. This comes from an early modern human level,

dated to about 30,000 years ago.

It's lovely, isn't it?

In fact, there's no evidence of modern humans in this area

before 30,000 years ago.

But the Neanderthal ornament is older than that,

by 7,000 years.

This raises the intriguing possibility

that when modern humans arrived here

they could have been copying Neanderthals.

But there is more.

Because since I made that film with Joao,

he and some colleagues have published dating

on this wonderful cave painting from El Castillo cave in Spain.

Now, they haven't dated the hand prints,

they've dated these red spots and they've found out that

at least one of these goes back to 41,000 years ago.

So this makes it the oldest cave painting that we have in Europe.

And the really intriguing thing about that is,

while it could have been made by our ancestors, Homo sapiens,

it could have equally been made by Neanderthals.

So why is that so important? What's the evolutionary advantage of art?

Well, art is always something we've thought of as uniquely modern human.

First of all, it's quite shocking to even consider that

Neanderthals might have had this capability.

And it's a really important form of communication.

I have this theory that it's all about sex

because if you can perform something really well,

if you can play an instrument or paint something really nicely,

decorate something, you get more sex.

So you think it's come into my cave and see my paintings?

See my etchings, yeah.

Art may have been a means of communication for them

but what about talking, could Neanderthals actually speak?

It's been an enduring debate,

whether Neanderthals actually had language

but I think we can reasonably assume they had language, can't we?

Yeah, when you look at their lifestyle you have to imagine that

they're cooperating in a way that really required advanced communication.

Well, we do have one of the little bones that is there on our skeleton

which I think is the Kebara hyoid bone.

This little bone is the only one in your body

that reflects the position of your larynx.

That tells you something about your voice box.

Right, I've got a voice box over here, I've got a larynx.

And this is about five times life-size.

So here is the hyoid bone, which looks massive on this model,

it's quite small on us.

You can feel it if you pinch just under your jaw bone, your mandible.

You can feel something quite hard

and you can wobble it from side to side.

That's the hyoid bone.

It supports the floor of the mouth but it also supports the larynx,

the voice box hangs down underneath it.

Well, how do we try to reconstruct all of this soft tissue

based on just a bone?

George, are you up there?

Yes, Alice, I'm right up here with the hyoid bone.

Sandra Martelli is a palaeoanthropologist who's been

examining Neanderthal hyoid bones and a series of Neanderthal skulls

with the aim of recreating soft tissue of the vocal tract

and finding out whether Neanderthals could speak.

Now, that's a bone that's just floating around in the throat,

it isn't attached to anything.

There's no soft tissue,

how do you go about recreating what's happening?

That's right, you just recapped that quite nicely.

This bone doesn't have any bony connection to anything,

it's just purely held in position by the muscles.

This is a human one, here's a Neanderthal one,

from the shape and size

you couldn't tell whether the Neanderthal could speak.

So what I've prepared here is a CT scan

from one of many volunteers that we have.

Then actually see the actual bones.

-So here is the hyoid bone right here.

-The blue bone is the hyoid bone.

We can actually use for example the length of the mandible

and the height of the face to predict in humans

where this bone should actually go in relationship to the mandible.

We call this the human model.

Then we can take a CT scan of La Ferrassie

and we can use this model to actually put the hyoid in position.

So what you've got here is a best guesstimate

of where the hyoid bone would sit.

That's right.

You might just see that here the hyoid sits in the same distance

from the mandible as we saw in the human

but it sits a little bit forward, creating quite a big space here.

So we've got a pretty good idea of where the hyoid bone

would have sat in the throat but can we find anything else out?

Can we work out if the Neanderthals could speak or make a noise?

Well, if you swap round,

I've got Anna Barney here, who's an acoustical engineer

from Southampton University.

How do we take this further?

Well, we had the problem still of there being no soft tissue

of the Neanderthals so what we did is, we took a modern human skull

and we found some landmarks on that

and we could find the same landmarks on the Neanderthal skull,

so we morphed the modern human skull until the landmarks fitted

over the Neanderthal landmarks.

Then we took the modern human vocal tract

and we applied the same rule to stretch and distort that

so it also fitted into the Neanderthals skull.

The important sounds are the quantal vowels.

Those are the vowels ahh, eee and ooh.

And these are synthesised sounds of what you think a Neanderthal

would actually have sounded like.

Yes, based on our modelling,

this is what we think they would have sounded like.

-So the first one is the ahh.

-COMPUTER BEEPS

-The eee.

-COMPUTER BEEPS

-And the ooh.

-COMPUTER BEEPS

So the eee and the ohh sound quite like a modern human would

but the ahh is a little bit different.

So play them again. Sounds really weird.

Ahh.

COMPUTER BEEPS

COMPUTER BEEPS

And when we look at languages, some have a lot of vowels,

some don't have very many, some have only five,

but they all have ahh, eee and ooh.

If the Neanderthals could produce an ahh, an eee and a ooh,

they were well on the way to speaking.

Well, that is excellent. Alice, what do you think of that?

I still think we're quite a long way off from actually knowing

what a Neanderthal sounded like but I know some people have pointed out

other things that might help us try to establish

whether Neanderthals could have spoken.

So, George, we're looking at skulls still.

And we're actually going to look at one tiny hole

in the base of the skull and it's here.

And it's just through there

and let me just show that on the lipstick camera.

This little hole just there

is where a nerve called the hypoglossal nerve comes out.

And that's the one that supplies the tongue

and obviously the tongue's really important in speaking.

We can't really see that on our Neanderthal cast

but we've got some images.

I'll go up with the images of the better cast.

And you can see right here, we've got a skewer going right through

the hypoglossal canal and of course it's in the same size and location

as in a human but what's key about this is that it's the same diameter.

So it's consistent with the idea that

the nerves innervating the tongue are alike

between Neanderthals and us.

This is the idea that the hypoglossal canal is a similar size

in humans and Neanderthals,

therefore Neanderthals could probably speak.

There have been other studies looking at a range of other primates

and they've actually shown that the hypoglossal canal

is a similar size in all of them as well and we know

that monkeys can't speak like us, so we're still none the wiser really.

This is a real problem, with every piece of anatomy on the hard tissue

that points to possibly language, there's something to question it.

With this, it's scaling, with the larynx, it's the absolute position.

I mean, everything that we try to do to figure out language,

we come ultimately to a dead end.

We're going to have to wait for a mummified Neanderthal

to emerge from the permafrosts of Siberia before we know

what all this soft tissue anatomy looked like,

before we know what their tongues and larynxes looked like.

This debate is going to run and run.

Until we find a Neanderthal in an ice pack or invent time travel

we'll never know for sure whether they could speak.

There seems to be no reason to assume that they couldn't, I think,

but we do need to move on.

Is there anything else we can tell from the skull?

We haven't looked at the teeth in detail yet.

What's peculiar about these teeth, I think,

is that the ones at the front are really heavily worn.

And, John, you've got some wonderful images behind you.

Yeah, when you take a look at the way these teeth are worn,

I mean, they're worn right down to almost where they meet the gum,

but they're also worn in the front teeth in a very bevelled way.

So is that eating, is that from chewing?

Yeah, when you look at the way they're worn,

it's very consistently outwards,

outwards in the top, outwards in the bottom.

That's not from chewing,

this isn't the teeth meeting and making contact,

this is the teeth being used as tools.

They're taking their teeth and they're gripping onto things.

One of the most likely things that they're doing is

taking probably garments of skins and working them, working them.

We saw the scraping earlier but that working, working is necessary

to keep those skins soft and pliable so that you can wear them.

It's not just the external appearance

of Neanderthal teeth that are fascinating.

I went to Grenoble in southern France to see how

state-of-the-art technology is being used to shed light

on secrets deep inside Neanderthal teeth.

This is Europe's largest synchrotron.

It's a particle accelerator

but what we are really interested in is not the particles themselves

but what they produce, because that is incredibly powerful X-rays.

These X-rays are a thousand billion times stronger than the ones

produced in a normal hospital X-ray machine.

They let you see inside any object, like this apple,

without destroying it,

creating images at an astonishingly high resolution.

The way these X-rays are produced is quite extraordinary.

An electron gun fires electrons out at very high speeds.

And then they're released into a circuit,

which is nearly a kilometre in circumference.

And they are manipulated by magnets as they go, so they oscillate,

and they end up emitting very powerful X-rays.

Dr Paul Tafforeau is using the synchrotron

to X-ray Neanderthal teeth.

The X-ray images reveal the finest details of the internal structure

of some very rare remains, without destroying them.

That's beautiful.

The X-rays reveal growth lines within a tooth.

They can be counted just like the growth rings in trees.

They're known as Retzius lines.

Here you can see all the things we call the Retzius lines.

They are perfectly regular lines.

In Neanderthals, these occur up to every nine days.

At an even higher resolution,

Paul can see the daily growth lines in-between them.

What you see on the right are the Retzius lines and between them

you can see the daily lines just here.

And those are the daily increments and that is fantastic, isn't it?

How beautiful is that?

So this is a record of somebody's life

to the resolution of single days from thousands of years ago.

Exactly.

Between the Retzius lines of this individual

are eight daily growth lines.

So once you've done that you can go back to your lower resolution,

count up all the Retzius lines,

multiply it by that and you've got your age.

-Correct.

-That's Brilliant.

Paul is collaborating with Dr Tanya Smith of Harvard University.

Using this technique they're able to tell exactly how old

a Neanderthal child was when it died.

They're comparing this with previous estimates of age

based on how well developed the teeth were.

This could shed light on why they died out and we survived.

The tooth Paul showed me came from a Neanderthal child

that was previously though to be up to six years old when it died.

We were able to use the synchrotron to estimate

the age at death for this individual.

We came up with the age of three years old, which was remarkable.

Does this mean that Neanderthals were effectively growing up

quicker than modern humans?

There's variation within populations.

By and large, though, Neanderthals do show

a faster period of growth and development.

Do you think this casts any light on why we are still here today

and the Neanderthals aren't?

It's tempting to suggest that something about having this

prolonged period of growth and development

was an advantage for us and it's tempting to think

that that may have something to do with learning and social behaviour.

You know, we're co-operative breeders.

We are so successful because we share the burden of raising young,

and how co-operative were the Neanderthals?

We don't really know.

This is such elegant research

and what it's revealing is truly surprising.

Neanderthal children grew up much more quickly than our own.

So there is this fundamental difference in life histories

that might just have played a role

in the different fates of our two species.

It's pretty amazing technology.

Absolutely. To be able to age it day by day.

Are their brains growing faster?

Well, we think that all of them is growing faster.

So it means, what, that they've got less time to learn.

It's interesting, because the teeth we can really put that date on.

With the brain, it's more difficult.

And what we believe is that the period of development in humans,

which is long, is related to learning and expanding your brain.

Most animals don't have childhoods like ours, do they, George?

Absolutely not.

They grow up and reach a reproductive age very quickly

so this childhood that we have seems to be all about learning.

Yeah, it looks that way.

Of course there are other things that teeth can help to tell us

and one of those things is what Neanderthal faces would have looked like.

So let's catch up with Viktor. How are you doing with the face?

Well, I've worked out the musculature now.

That's on the actual hard surface reconstruction.

Now, I'm applying what I did on that job,

I'm applying it now digitally.

So you're working in clay but also digitally at the same time?

Correct.

And we're getting towards having a Neanderthal face,

which is so exciting.

I can see him emerging.

And Viktor brought his fleshed-out head over from the States

to our model makers so he could fit it on the body.

Viktor made the head of La Ferrassie 1 at his base in New York.

While in the UK the model makers finished muscling up the body.

After two months of work it was time to put the two together.

Oh, wow, looking great so far.

Body fat tissue and everything looks good too.

I like the structure you've given him, because he looks strong

but not like he's been pumping iron or anything, but at the same time

he's definitely not a guy you really want to mess with too much.

Wow.

Wow! Cool, man!

That's a mean-looking dude!

He may look a little mean but what happened to him?

Why are we here and they're not?

Well, here's 60,000 years ago

and Neanderthals had been doing very well indeed.

Then scroll forward to 48,000 years ago

and something happened that nearly wiped them out.

So what was happening in their world then?

Well, look at this,

you can see that the climate that they had been experiencing had

been changing from hot to cold to hot to cold for thousands of years.

And they'd been coping pretty well.

Then a sudden spell 48,000 years ago plunged their world

into one of the coldest periods they'd ever experienced

and in just a few decades the north Atlantic froze over.

And with the climate fluctuating like that they must have been

under enormous pressure and some Neanderthal remains

found recently in Spain suggest they could have been in big trouble.

I'm travelling through the mountainous region of Asturias

in Northern Spain, where 12 years ago

archaeologists began excavating a particularly gruesome find

which appeared to re-establish the reputation

of the Neanderthals as brutes.

The site is inside a cave known as El Sidron.

Archaeologist Marco de la Rasilla Vives

has been leading the excavation here.

Disappearing down into the bowels of the earth in search of Neanderthals.

The excavations here have produced the remains of at least 13 Neanderthals,

some of them adults, some of them children,

and Marco is taking me to the exact spot where those remains were found.

The bones appear to have fallen down into the cave

from a rock shelter on the hillside above.

Here is the place where we found all the bones and all the lithic tools.

There's a fissure going right up above me here.

So this is where the bones have fallen down, then,

and have collapsed down into this chamber.

That's it.

When do you think they date to?

49,000 years before present.

-So this is before modern humans arrived in the area.

-Sure. Sure.

It's also the time when climate change

was hitting the Neanderthals hard and the population crashed.

The bones from the caves were taken to Madrid

to the National Museum of Natural Sciences.

Dr Antonio Rosas and his team are studying

some 2,000 fragments of bones from 13 skeletons found at El Sidron.

Three of the bones they've looked at so far

seem to show signs of cannibalism.

So what's the evidence?

The most direct evidence is cut marks.

-And you see...

-Oh, yes, absolutely.

They cut like this, probably in that particular case

to remove the masseter muscle.

So this muscle that comes down here and attaches just there.

Why do you think this is cannibalism?

If we go to this long bone, you can see here

that there is some kind of notch,

this is what we call a percussion mark that has been produced

by a stone hammer to break the bone and get into the marrow.

The only reason you would smash into a femur like this

is to get at that rich fatty marrow inside.

That's right. That's right.

At that time the only human species that were living

in this part of the world were the Neanderthals.

So this was Neanderthals on Neanderthals.

It's quite shocking.

Cannibalism could be a demonstration of love.

It could be a way of venerating.

Venerating. For us, it is quite difficult to understand this.

In our mindset, this has been associated with brutality.

It's interesting because we're looking at evidence

of cannibalism but at the moment we don't know if that's a snapshot

of people in desperation or whether what we're seeing is a glimpse

into Neanderthal culture and what was quite normal behaviour for them.

Well, whether it was desperation or veneration,

the really interesting thing about these bones is not that

cannibalism was taking place but when it was occurring.

These bones were dated to 49,000 years ago.

Right around the time when it got particularly cold.

But there was something else going on at the same time

that we just can't discount.

Another factor came into play. That was us.

Within a few thousand years of the big freeze,

modern humans arrived in western Europe.

The Neanderthal population here had been reduced

to just a handful of individuals.

We don't know if we fought with them

but we do know that we bred with them.

Within 20,000 years Neanderthals were extinct.

But their DNA lives on in us.

Today, most people from outside Africa can trace

up to 4% of their DNA back to Neanderthals.

What might that Neanderthal DNA mean for us today?

What effects might it be having in our genomes?

Well, it's very difficult to say.

But I have some results from you two which can shed some light on it.

So this is a gene on chromosome 16 called WFDC1,

and it's controlling cell growth.

We don't know what difference it makes to have different copies of it.

So this is very early stages at the moment

but we're starting to understand the implications of having

some Neanderthal genes in our genome.

And actually we do know something about Neanderthal genes

which is very interesting

and that's that at least some Neanderthals had red hair.

And that's very useful for Viktor.

So catching up with Viktor again.

This is great, so we've actually got hair colour.

What's great about working in this nature is that it gives you

the ability to test out different looks, different hair

and different skin colour, before you commit.

This is grounded in science.

OK, it's looking quite artistic but there's science at the base of it.

With the skin colour you've done really pale skin.

So this is someone who lived in a northern climate.

Right, much like us.

He's really starting to come together.

Now there's one question I want to ask.

Can we tell how this individual died?

It's a great question and usually we can't.

But in this case the skeleton gives us some really interesting clues.

On the outside of your bones is a membrane.

And you can see here where it's roughened.

That membrane was laying down new bone at around the time

this individual died.

And it's at the distal end of the tibia,

it's also on the distal femora.

The key thing about this is that it's on both sides and symmetrical.

And actually that is pretty indicative of

one particular type of disease.

And it called hypertrophic pulmonary osteoarthropathy.

-And it basically means...

-In English, please.

It basically means you're laying down new bone but you're doing it in

such a way that we know it's related to lung and sometimes heart disease.

But it makes it very probable that this individual had either

a bad lung infection or lung cancer.

It's one of the very rare cases where we have a fossil where

we can actually make some indication of the cause of death.

So from these few bones that we started with

we've established that Neanderthals were strong, adaptable

and possibly had an emergent culture and budding language.

They were well suited to their ice age home and, given that

they were such a successful species they survived for 350,000 years,

yet when the crunch came they may simply have been unlucky.

It is very sad that they're no longer with us but

we have been able to bring La Ferrassie 1 back to life

with the help of all of this scientific evidence

and our amazing model makers.

We started with a composite skeleton based on La Ferrassie 1

and other finds, and over nearly three months

we've carefully been reconstructing him.

With extraordinary attention to detail,

the muscles were painstakingly added to rebuild his body.

His face was recreated using forensic techniques.

Then the skin and hair were added.

Now he's finished, and he's here.

So shall we go and have a look?

Can't wait.

This is so exciting. We have literally never seen this before.

Under a sheet. Go on then, Viktor.

THEY ALL GASP

Oh, my goodness, he's really lifelike.

The nose is really prominent.

That looks fantastic.

Still trying to get my head around the fact that this guy

is in my ancestry, and not that far back. John, what do you think?

Give me a break, you look like twins.

THEY LAUGH

Isn't he wonderful?

This just looks like a living, breathing Neanderthal.

I'm slightly freaked out by him actually.

I just think he's going to start moving.

That is unbelievable. It's uncanny.

What do you reckon?

It just has this humanising effect to put the flesh on.

The challenge is to make something that is different from us

look different.

In fact, the details point to great similarity.

I could just imagine him striding off. Colin, what do you reckon?

Is he muscly enough?

He's got to be, but it's really impressive, isn't it?

It's a case where focusing on bone doesn't give the whole picture.

Viktor, such a good job. He's absolutely brilliant.

Thank you. Thank you all.

Everybody chipped in on this one.

Our investigations tonight have revealed some astonishing insights

into the life and times of one of our most well-known prehistoric ancestors.

The Neanderthals.

We weren't always the only humans alive, in fact, it wasn't inevitable

that we would end up the only human species on the planet.

Tomorrow night we're going even further back in time,

1.5 million years, to recreate one of the earliest humans, Homo erectus.

In America we unearth details of what their world was like

from evidence found deep below the sea bed.

It's like being given a history book of earth climate

and no-one's ripped the pages out.

I hear about new evidence that suggests Homo erectus

was far more advanced than previously thought.

That is a major breakthrough.

And I went to a dig in Georgia to find out what might have

given Homo erectus an evolutionary edge.

So how does this person survive in this environment with no teeth?

-So join us then as we meet another ancestor.

-Goodnight.

Goodnight.