Hey everyone, thanks for watching. Just a couple of points. CORRECTION: AN OLDER NEANDERTHAL BURIAL HAS BEEN FOUND AT TABUN IN ISRAEL AND DATES TO 130,000 years ago. WHICH MEANS THAT THIS NOT NECESSARILY A LEARNT BEHAVIOUR FROM Homo sapiens. I had to change the thumbnail. Apparently Neanderthal nudity is too scandalous for the algorithm. Second, my wife is going to give birth imminently so I probably won't be as active in the comments. Research is the most time consuming part of my video making process so over the next few months i'm going to focus on really specific topics. For example, "Earliest evidence of.....". This should cut down my research time and i'll be able to focus on being a dad. Thanks for watching, I appreciate it.
I've never heard such a smart presentation from a purveyor of Neanderthal pornography before! Maybe Pornhub will create a new niche Neanderthal section in your honor.
Is it possible that Neanderthals practiced something similar to the native Hawaiians, who baked the body to more easily remove the flesh not for eating but to preseve the bones for their mana? That's just the first thing to come to mind for me after the obvious conclusion of cannibalism
Gday mate, i dont know much about the Hawaiian Polynesians, but all the rest loved eating people. Read about tappu/kappu/taboo there were many rules such as not letting your shadow touch the chief or his house, not sharing a meal with your wife while she had her period, having dirt on you when you spoke to the king and stopping bowing before the chief stopped eating for a few examples. But only one punishment, dong on the head and in the pot. Its hard to get fatty meat on an island. If you did transgress you had a chance to get to a sacred enclosure to be purified by a priest but you had to be a fast runner
I think Neanderthals could have many different cultures, and thus different ways to deal with the dead.. the better question should be "Are Neanderthals capable of thinking about the afterlife and put some effort in handling their dead?" Because if the answer to that question is yes, then everything is possible, tbh..
English, innit? Fish and Chip Shop = Chip Shop = Chippy. Be careful how you use the word, though: In some parts of the UK, Chippie is also slang for "prostiture".
The El Sidron cave has made it evident due to DNA testing that the members discovered were close kin, so it would follow that the other caves with similar findings were under similar circumstances. This is most probably ascertained though, just search up the research papers written on each cave.
How many though? Anthropology and archaeology find mostly proofs of symbolic cannibalism in homo sapiens. No idea how popular it was for our close cousins, neanderthals, but it seems that the bodies were deposited there over period of time and are genetically linked. So it's either a burial site or a site of cannibalism of a weird tribe that was killing and eating members of only one family over a period of time.
Neanderthal diet was 80% meat. 20% plant based. Early humans and modern humans were the opposite in most cases. They had giant eye sockets, were nocturnal, antisocial, their brains left imprints on their brain case, had massive occipital lobes and meet the criteria of being predators in every way. Those tribes you're talking about have archaic DNA rittled throughout their genome from when we interbred with them and Denisovans when we first migrated out of Africa. Compare these guys to the Khoisan in South Africa who've been there for 20,000 years and genetically isolated for 100,000 and tell me how much they're like homo sapiens. Bonobos have just as much in common with us as they did.
"The dark and mysterious land we call Belgium" As a belgian I can agree we really have not changed much from us now, I did not know that you eat granny too tho.
A superb summary I felt. I shall use this moving forwards to describe that dark mysterious land somewhere between France, Germany and the land of the Giant Chicks.
@@kesorangutan6170 They had it coming those Congolese. Imagine not wanting to work for free in abject slavery, under threat of torture. Then some crackpot White Scientist turns up and wants to measure your head and nose. And you are upset about this - the chuffing check! It a bit like the Indians being upset about inviting the English over for tea and trade and then being upset when they take over their country for over 200 years and turn them into servants. The check of it, I tell you. And on another thing.............................
Cannibalism may have been circumstancial, under conditions of starvation. They didnt move around as much as homo sapiens, so they may have been more exposed to ocassional over hunting in a specific area and consecuent hunger.
Homo Sapiens didn't actually move around as much as many think. EG it took several thousand years for Americas to be populated. In reality the spread of Neanderthals into Europe was not much slower than the spread of Homo Sapiens into Europe.20% slower by my estimation at most.
I had a friend look over my shoulder and ask "Why are you watching various pictures of skeletons?". Which I think summarizes well Stefans channel. Stefan Milo "Come for the skeletons stay for the commentary" :D
First of all, I'd like to say, great video. You've just gained a new sub ;). I know you probably won't be reading this but since, as you've stated, you're no expert on the matter, and since I'm having a couple of paleoanthropology exams (Actually, one of my professors was involved in the Krapina site, since she's a Neanderthal expert), I'd like to correct a couple of things that you said that aren't totally supported by the scientific community (nothing really is in this field but I'd like, to the best of my knowledge, to just bring to you what most of the experts think). First of all, you cite ( at around 1:33) the site of "Gran Dolina" as a "cannibal neanderthal site", so to speak. Although there are some Musterian artifacts in the site (linkable to Neanderthals), the Homo bones found probably are of Homo antecessor, and not Homo neanderthalensis. There is still some controversy as to if H. antecessor is a direct ancestor of H. heidelbergensis and, as such, H. neanderthalensis, but it is not proven at the moment and H. antecessor could just be a distant uncle of us and neanderthals. But it is true that they practiced cannibalism (some expert say that they "ate the brains of children as part of a daily diet"). We also practiced cannibalism (See Homo sapiens idaltu, but that's another story). Secondly I'd like to say that it is not proven that we "brought" burials to Neanderthal. If anything, research shows that we got it from them. The older neanderthal burial is dated between 120 and 170 kya, in the Tabun Cave (Mt. Carmel, Israel), at max 100kya before you stated in the video. The Levantine area has always been a crossroads for most homininis who wanted to leave Africa, and as such many different populations and species lived together (Possibly peacefully, since many burial sites seem to be shared). In the same place, 100kya, we have the first Homo sapiens burial discovered, so it would seem like Homo neanderthalensis "invented" the burial ritual. Interestingly enough, the first African H. sapiens burial (so with populations that hadn't come in contact with H. neanderthalensis) are dated around 20kya.
I have a question that I'd like to bounce off you. Is it possible burial originated in colder climates because if you leave a corpse in the cold, it lasts much much longer and that might be unsettling for individuals of the species to walk around seeing their dead friend's face get slowly chewed off in the days and weeks following their death, so to avoid having to face that, they bury or administer it, and to help them get through the grisly process, they invented religious reasons to tell the younger ones to make it easier to deal with. I ask this for two reasons; one, you say there is evidence burials originated with neanderthals, two, it brings to mind the story of the football team who's plane crashed in the Peruvian mountains and had to eat their dead friends to get through it and since they were all Catholic, the Pope administered an Apostolic Forgiveness to them, telling them that they did not commit an unforgiveable sin by consuming the flesh of their dead friends. If a species didn't have cannibalism already, and members start dying in the snow, the corpse and meat gets preserved much longer, and it's a much more tempting option to consume the corpse if it's not below ground.
You mentioned shared burial sites?? That is amazing! It could be possible then, that when our ancestors wandered out of Africa, they possibly stayed near / with Neanderthal groups, who taught them how to bury their dead? I absolutely love the idea of different 'people' sharing a common graveyard, so to speak. It seems to point towards cooperation rather than "you different, me kill you". 🤣
@@BenjiQ575 It is true that that wouldnt have been a pretty sight to see, but from what we know the first burial sites where in relatively hot places, even for the times (reminding that it was during the ice age). The oldest burials we know of, the Neanderthal ones, are not in Europe but they're in the Middle East, very much in what is not Israel/Palestine, around 170 and 120 thousand years ago (Tabun cave). Id bounce this one back to you, what would you think would be worse, leaving someone out in a cave frozen and possibly chewed off, or rotting corpses in the middle eastern sun? We cant know for sure what moved the first hominids to burial, but we know where and when (kinda). Hope this helps! Sorry for not answering earlier :P
@@ellenbrooks8061 Yes! There is a not so small theory that basically says exactly this: we got burial and many other things (possibly even a rock chopping tecnique) from Neanderthals, and we just made it our own and in some cases developed it further. What happened between sapiens and neanderthals for sure we cant know, but from genetic studies and archeological finds it turns out that....its complicated! Probably some groups went along fine and even interbred, some others had problems and some others even went at war against eachother (We do not have direct evidence of sapiens/neanderthaliensis conflict but its not an absurd theory). What we know is that when the first sapiens wandered out of Africa they reached the great crossroads that is the Middle East, where Neanderthals had already been for tens of thousands of years, and sapiens communities start showing burials in the paleoarcheologic record only after reaching places where there had already been neanderthal burial sites for thousands and thousands of years. As a side note, Id like to talk about what I meant when I said "shared burial sites". Do not think of like one cave where both Neanderthals and sapiens put their dead one next to the other. Its more like, for theres a few thousands of years of overlap in burial sites (caves) used by both Neaderthal and sapiens that were part of the same cave system. Its like (gross oversimplification) if sapiens and neanderthals used different caves situated on opposing sites of the same mountain to put their respective dead. Its not exactly like one body next to the other, but if said cave system held some symbolic/sacred meaning for any of those two communities, enough to make those caves a burial site, they probably wouldnt have shared it with someone they didnt get along with. Theres much we dont know!
You narrated this perfectly like some kind of actor or story teller. I appreciate your well researched videos and your thrifty filming takes nothing from the integrity of the video.
I wonder if the fact that there are multiple bodies in some of their burial sites is evidence that tribes were compelled to bring their dead to specific sites after death. A body isn't all that easy to transport whole as any lone large game hunter can tell you. Is it possible that they simply broke down their dead to ease transport back to their compulsory burial site?
Stefan, given that Neanderthals were around for a few hundred thousand years, any idea as to how their physical appearance and culture may have evolved over all those millenniums? I would have to think that a ca. 250,000 BC Neanderthal would be somewhat different and live somewhat differently, then a ca. 40,000 BC one.
They were evolving like us, but at a slower rate and were inbred, anti social and not as smart/agile. So their story ended while ours was just starting to get even more interesting.
First time to this channel. Awesome video - I love the way you present the material so clearly and note each instance where nuance or hypothesis is taken. And how hilarious that tens of thousands of years ago Neanderthals would not have known that far in the future cousins/descendants of their species would be protecting their nudity on a retrospective on their existence. Reality is so so bizarre sometimes I just can't.
Perhaps the neanderthals cannibalized were taken from a rival tribe and the ones that were likely buried are their fellow kin. Perhaps they were just burying them to dig them up for later consumption/. Burying food can be a way to preserve it (probably not the case but interesting to think anyway) BTW that neanderthal incased in stalagmite is one of the coolest, yet creepiest things I've seen.
Neanderthals never operated in tribes like humans, their social units were more akin to *troops*, similar to other apes like chimpanzees. Neanderthal troops were also small and lived isolated from one another so violent encounters would have been rare and counter productive.
@@sahulianhooligan7046 What about bands. Bands are smaller than tribes. And still exist in the Rainforest. They consist of a nuclear and extended family that hunt and gather but are not in a village hamlet.
@@covenawhite4855 Human bands still network with other bands of nearby regions in a reciprocal way. But Neanderthals kept to themselves in their small closely guarded territory and they seemed to be highly xenophobic.
@@sahulianhooligan7046 How would they find new mates? Surely they weren't just constantly breeding with close family members, right? I don't know how chimpanzee troops do it, maybe Neanderthals did it similarly?
The guy with just two teeth shown nicely at 6min 25 lost at least his upper incisors post mortem. He did indeed have advanced gum disease, his remaining teeth would have been quite mobile but he could probably manage food better than you suggest. Love your videos.
As always....Great video Stefan....loved it. With that said I have one point....This is the third video I have seen of late that says that the toothless old Neanderthals probably needed help chewing their food. I have dentures and no teeth and I regularly eat most everything without my teeth, including steak and some potato chips. There are only a few foods I avoid without my teeth.
Thanks for the video and congrats and good luck at being a dad!! You will b awesome. Thanks again for all the time and energy you put into your great videos!!
When you cross your eyes when looking at the double skulls, you can lock in on a 3D view, except with the left eye seeing the right image overlapping the right eye seeing the left image, the depth is inverted. So the front of the skull appears furthest away.
Your comments about evolution, depositing bodies into caves, and symbolism got me to thinking that may explain how caves became associated with the underworld/afterlife/dead things. Just a thought.
Just had a thought. Maybe bones defleshed and marrow removed to clean them so that the person could be more easily carried with the group when the moved around the landscape. Later sapiens often kept their dead close. Buried under the house floor, mummified and placed by the door etc. Bones being deposited later when maybe the fashion changed or the closer relatives themselves had died.
How refreshing to be presented with information without ridiculous presumption. The majority of anthropologists, upon mention of a scratch on a bone, would have flatly stated that Mildred was Thanksgiving dinner and that Uncle Newt knitted doilies. I’d given up hope that anyone was honest anymore.
It is interesting that there are no finds that suggest cremations, at least I don't know of any. But of course you have to say that the bones would probably have been crushed and are therefore extremely difficult to find. For me, cremation is actually the most obvious method of burial. It might be interesting to examine Neanderthal deposits for such traces. Oh damn, I actually learned the wrong profession. I would like to pursue this hypothesis. A super interesting video, thanks. Good luck as a father, best wishes to your wife too.
It would take a high temperature, time and lots of wood/fuel to cremate. Given the lack of trees and the need to migrate, maybe cremation was not the easiest option. However, as you mention, bones could be crushed...so the possibility would be there. As a funeral director, I find the funeral practices across time and cultures fascinating.
I think humans piled up their dead until they encountered their first great person. They said "this person is special. We can't just throw them with the rest" That thought was the beginning of ritual burial
9:48 Hey, Altamura is 50km away from where I live! :D I'm not from there but I really like that city. Great food, that incredible Neanderthal site... and there's even a fossilized beach! With fossilized footprints from big herbivorous dinosaurs - over 200 dinos and 5 different species. A supposed migration happened there :D
...and for the soundtrack, check out Neoandertals. Estonian avant-garde brutal death metal focusing on the subject matter of neanderthals and their defleshing burial rites. Weird but tasty!
We know for certain the Neanderthals did not leave the flowers on the grave at Shanidar because tests were done on the flowers and they were from varieties that did not exist yet when the Neanderthals died.
What its it, 4:00 p.m. over there? Well, here I just woke up. And I read, "How did NETHERLANDS Dispose of the Dead?" Which might not make a bad video, actually......
Perhaps that is why we love our grandparents, our genes still remember we ate them when they died, the neanderthals celebrated both easter, thanksgiving, christmas, new year and also grandparents funerals
The reason might be desperation. I'm one of those who believe that cave men didn't live in caves. Why should they choose somewhere damp, dark and cold when even light shelter outside was more comfortable? And a recent analysis of children's teeth showing a brief period with a high lead content not only suggests the lead came from when they were in a cave but that cave stays were brief. What's being called cannibalism might be merely be desperation during a really cold winter that had forced them underground.
My questions are, did they have fur? Or were those finger ridges that modern apes have from hanging on to their mothers caused by fur clothing? Although the evidence for neanderthal clothing is tenuous at best. Does the size of their eyes and larger brain mean they were nocturnal? Ive read that there is a shared neanderthal/wolf burial/village site, some of the first evidence of human/canine cooperation. Please expand on this. Because ive also read that it was the homo sapien/wolf-dog alliance (both species were competitors to neanderthals) that finally allowed the competitive advantage homo sapiens needed to spread into europe. There is a Papua new guinean tribe that defleshes their dead so they can get old pop's bones out for social occasions Why are artists depictions of neanderthals nearly always clean shaven? Best of luck to you and yours Adam
They were probably appreciative of beautiful things...rocks, flowers, nature..Artist were of a higher thinking...but who is to say they didn’t learn to appreciate patterns and color.
Oddly specific and probably highly controversial thiught: What if the small animals were buried with the Neanderthals as a type of headstone. Like an elder dies and they catch a small songbird kill it and bury it with them as a similar action to, “here lies Robin, loved mother”
Are we able to know if the people who ate the bodies were of the same clan or whatever? Essentially, whether they ate grandma, or if they attacked a rival group and ate them, rather than their “own”? That could explain the ages maybe? Is there a way to answer that question with available evidence? 🧐
I wonder if the cannibals were like they were portrayed in Quest for Fire! A great movie, but of course, the main characters were early Homo Sapiens, but some tribes were cannibals, and not for religious purposes!
As soon as I saw this I jumped to watch it. I really like your videos. I'm glad you didn't use the spoon this time - otherwise we might have subconsciously imply that we ate them... Which I've always wondered as they'd be a great source of protein.
Humans are actually a rather risky, dangerous prey. They fight back, there's not much meat on them, and you're better off cooperating with them than hunting them.
You might be surprised how good a solid stick can dig into the right soils even when roughly fashioned. This can be seen with modern hunter gatherers when digging for tubers or breaking open animals burrows and termite nests.
Is there no evidence of balms or ointments or other substances applied to the remains or found in the soil? I daresay there'd be other clues to cross-reference this and debunk or support, but the first thing that popped to my head were those depictions of shamanistic pre-agricultural societies that prepared bodily remains in different ways (head-hunting, taking finger bones and hanging them around a neck, using a long bone of a corpse as a special spiritual tool like a sceptre) so what if the cave was used as a spiritual place? What if they either took them there before or shortly after they died, and used the cave as a place to either commune with these dead neanderthals or prepare or administer them in some way to facilitate their journey into death? The strange removal of the face and weird percussion marks could be a kind of belief system where removing the skin of the face allows the soul to emerge and be released from the corpse. Perhaps the percussion marks were done after the face was removed to, like, "knock on the door" to get the spirit to wake up and get out of the corpse? I have absolutely zero evidence, this is entirely speculation on my part by someone with zero academic credibility, just wondering aloud, but I have a feeling that if they weren't consuming the flesh in the same way they were consuming other animals there's only a handful of reasons for that. Also, another question wondering aloud, do we think that maybe burial originated as a custom in colder climates because if you leave a corpse in the cold, it lasts much much longer and that might be unsettling for individuals of the species to walk around seeing their dead friend's face get slowly chewed off in the days and weeks following their death, so to avoid having to face that, they bury or administer it, and to help them get through the grisly process, they invented religious reasons to tell the younger ones to make it easier to deal with.
Id say that it is advantageous to hide or bury the dead, hence they probably did it. 1. To not to attract predatory animals to their location. 2. To avoid leaving traces of their movements to other groups/homo sapiens etc. (assuming they might be hostile in some way) - Makes sense right?
I don’t want to offend you but You do not understand what The difference between private property and personal property private property is the private ownership of the means of production of goods and services such as factories farms and shops On the other hand personal property is your personal belongings such as your house your tent your tools your clothing.
It's crazy to me that they would even want to breed with each other. I mean, wouldn't it sort of be like a chimp tryin to mate with a gorilla? I'm not trying to be crass, but they were different in so many ways I just don't get it.
@@safron2442 True... the ultimate evidence is that they were able to produce fertile offspring. So, yeah, they must not have been that different. Still, though... When you think that different ethnic groups of our same species often hate and distrust each other and look down on "mixed race" babies and marriages even today in 2020, it blows my mind that different *species* of human were widely breeding millennia ago.
if neanderthal were eating their own then we were also eating our own at that time cuz neaderthal were at the top of the food chain . only thing we would have done is followed them - same lifestyle . some tribe still do culturally i think ??
- Mom, I don't like my grandma.
- Shut up and clean your plate.
Lmao
Too soon?
Hahaha Hahaha, nearly peed!
Goddamnit!😂😂😂
Hey everyone, thanks for watching. Just a couple of points.
CORRECTION: AN OLDER NEANDERTHAL BURIAL HAS BEEN FOUND AT TABUN IN ISRAEL AND DATES TO 130,000 years ago. WHICH MEANS THAT THIS NOT NECESSARILY A LEARNT BEHAVIOUR FROM Homo sapiens.
I had to change the thumbnail. Apparently Neanderthal nudity is too scandalous for the algorithm.
Second, my wife is going to give birth imminently so I probably won't be as active in the comments.
Research is the most time consuming part of my video making process so over the next few months i'm going to focus on really specific topics. For example, "Earliest evidence of.....". This should cut down my research time and i'll be able to focus on being a dad.
Thanks for watching, I appreciate it.
Stefan Milo congratulations! I love your channel
Congratulations to the couple! Also post the video on pornhub, I'm pretty sure they won't mind the Neanderporn.
I've never heard such a smart presentation from a purveyor of Neanderthal pornography before! Maybe Pornhub will create a new niche Neanderthal section in your honor.
miloooo😘
Soon to be dual wielding baby and spoon. Congratulations, old bean.
Is it possible that Neanderthals practiced something similar to the native Hawaiians, who baked the body to more easily remove the flesh not for eating but to preseve the bones for their mana? That's just the first thing to come to mind for me after the obvious conclusion of cannibalism
There are also people that bury their families inside of themselves.
That should left some traces on the bones.
Gday mate,
i dont know much about the Hawaiian Polynesians, but all the rest loved eating people. Read about tappu/kappu/taboo there were many rules such as not letting your shadow touch the chief or his house, not sharing a meal with your wife while she had her period, having dirt on you when you spoke to the king and stopping bowing before the chief stopped eating for a few examples. But only one punishment, dong on the head and in the pot. Its hard to get fatty meat on an island.
If you did transgress you had a chance to get to a sacred enclosure to be purified by a priest but you had to be a fast runner
I think Neanderthals could have many different cultures, and thus different ways to deal with the dead.. the better question should be "Are Neanderthals capable of thinking about the afterlife and put some effort in handling their dead?" Because if the answer to that question is yes, then everything is possible, tbh..
Might be similar to tibetan sky burial
Cannibalism is an acceptable option when the chippy is closed.
It's just recycling. Might make a nice curry even.
Jacob Locklear yes, the chippy
i don't hear anyone complaining about the fremen drinking their dead pals
Aah the image of a Neanderthal family disapointed by lack of chippy tea...having a human donner party!
Desperate times call for desperate measures
Chippy is such a perfect nickname for fast food places.
Knowing Better I knew knowing better would watch this channel
English, innit? Fish and Chip Shop = Chip Shop = Chippy. Be careful how you use the word, though: In some parts of the UK, Chippie is also slang for "prostiture".
I wonder if they offer a "Neanderthal special" there?
@@garymitchell9848 prostiture? Is that someone that eats manure for money? 🤔
@Gary Mitchell someone is knowledgeble .
What if the evidence of cannibalism wasn’t from family members, but from other “enemies” plenty of tribes ate their fallen foes
Yah.
Anything is possible and sometimes you have to think out side the box of different possibilities
The El Sidron cave has made it evident due to DNA testing that the members discovered were close kin, so it would follow that the other caves with similar findings were under similar circumstances. This is most probably ascertained though, just search up the research papers written on each cave.
How many though? Anthropology and archaeology find mostly proofs of symbolic cannibalism in homo sapiens. No idea how popular it was for our close cousins, neanderthals, but it seems that the bodies were deposited there over period of time and are genetically linked. So it's either a burial site or a site of cannibalism of a weird tribe that was killing and eating members of only one family over a period of time.
Neanderthal diet was 80% meat. 20% plant based. Early humans and modern humans were the opposite in most cases. They had giant eye sockets, were nocturnal, antisocial, their brains left imprints on their brain case, had massive occipital lobes and meet the criteria of being predators in every way.
Those tribes you're talking about have archaic DNA rittled throughout their genome from when we interbred with them and Denisovans when we first migrated out of Africa. Compare these guys to the Khoisan in South Africa who've been there for 20,000 years and genetically isolated for 100,000 and tell me how much they're like homo sapiens. Bonobos have just as much in common with us as they did.
Potato/ potatoes - still the same.
"The dark and mysterious land we call Belgium"
As a belgian I can agree we really have not changed much from us now, I did not know that you eat granny too tho.
A superb summary I felt. I shall use this moving forwards to describe that dark mysterious land somewhere between France, Germany and the land of the Giant Chicks.
@@kesorangutan6170 They had it coming those Congolese. Imagine not wanting to work for free in abject slavery, under threat of torture. Then some crackpot White Scientist turns up and wants to measure your head and nose. And you are upset about this - the chuffing check! It a bit like the Indians being upset about inviting the English over for tea and trade and then being upset when they take over their country for over 200 years and turn them into servants. The check of it, I tell you. And on another thing.............................
@@kesorangutan6170 Indeed - there is a man with Nanny / mummy Issues if ever there was one.
@@kesorangutan6170 Love the ancient stuff too, any ones you can recommend?
That look Granny gets when she suddenly realizes you are trying to fatten her up...
I really appreciate the effort you are putting into this
Cannibalism may have been circumstancial, under conditions of starvation. They didnt move around as much as homo sapiens, so they may have been more exposed to ocassional over hunting in a specific area and consecuent hunger.
Absolutely. Hardship would be their main use of cannibalism. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Homo Sapiens didn't actually move around as much as many think. EG it took several thousand years for Americas to be populated. In reality the spread of Neanderthals into Europe was not much slower than the spread of Homo Sapiens into Europe.20% slower by my estimation at most.
alhesiad dd
Maybe they ate the vanquished enemies of local conflict......gain their strength
FIRST!
Also, congrats on fatherhood Stefan!
Stefan, you're easily my favorite channel on youtube. Keep up the great work and congrats on being a dad! I'm looking forward to future videos 👏🏼
NOM NOM NOM
this is a translation error, it should read ---- yum, yum, yum ???
Bravo, klipovi su ti odlicni! Gledam svaki kad izbacis, samo nastavi!
I had a friend look over my shoulder and ask "Why are you watching various pictures of skeletons?".
Which I think summarizes well Stefans channel.
Stefan Milo
"Come for the skeletons stay for the commentary" :D
First of all, I'd like to say, great video. You've just gained a new sub ;).
I know you probably won't be reading this but since, as you've stated, you're no expert on the matter, and since I'm having a couple of paleoanthropology exams (Actually, one of my professors was involved in the Krapina site, since she's a Neanderthal expert), I'd like to correct a couple of things that you said that aren't totally supported by the scientific community (nothing really is in this field but I'd like, to the best of my knowledge, to just bring to you what most of the experts think).
First of all, you cite ( at around 1:33) the site of "Gran Dolina" as a "cannibal neanderthal site", so to speak. Although there are some Musterian artifacts in the site (linkable to Neanderthals), the Homo bones found probably are of Homo antecessor, and not Homo neanderthalensis. There is still some controversy as to if H. antecessor is a direct ancestor of H. heidelbergensis and, as such, H. neanderthalensis, but it is not proven at the moment and H. antecessor could just be a distant uncle of us and neanderthals. But it is true that they practiced cannibalism (some expert say that they "ate the brains of children as part of a daily diet"). We also practiced cannibalism (See Homo sapiens idaltu, but that's another story).
Secondly I'd like to say that it is not proven that we "brought" burials to Neanderthal. If anything, research shows that we got it from them. The older neanderthal burial is dated between 120 and 170 kya, in the Tabun Cave (Mt. Carmel, Israel), at max 100kya before you stated in the video. The Levantine area has always been a crossroads for most homininis who wanted to leave Africa, and as such many different populations and species lived together (Possibly peacefully, since many burial sites seem to be shared).
In the same place, 100kya, we have the first Homo sapiens burial discovered, so it would seem like Homo neanderthalensis "invented" the burial ritual.
Interestingly enough, the first African H. sapiens burial (so with populations that hadn't come in contact with H. neanderthalensis) are dated around 20kya.
Also congrats for becoming a dad
I have a question that I'd like to bounce off you. Is it possible burial originated in colder climates because if you leave a corpse in the cold, it lasts much much longer and that might be unsettling for individuals of the species to walk around seeing their dead friend's face get slowly chewed off in the days and weeks following their death, so to avoid having to face that, they bury or administer it, and to help them get through the grisly process, they invented religious reasons to tell the younger ones to make it easier to deal with. I ask this for two reasons; one, you say there is evidence burials originated with neanderthals, two, it brings to mind the story of the football team who's plane crashed in the Peruvian mountains and had to eat their dead friends to get through it and since they were all Catholic, the Pope administered an Apostolic Forgiveness to them, telling them that they did not commit an unforgiveable sin by consuming the flesh of their dead friends. If a species didn't have cannibalism already, and members start dying in the snow, the corpse and meat gets preserved much longer, and it's a much more tempting option to consume the corpse if it's not below ground.
You mentioned shared burial sites?? That is amazing! It could be possible then, that when our ancestors wandered out of Africa, they possibly stayed near / with Neanderthal groups, who taught them how to bury their dead? I absolutely love the idea of different 'people' sharing a common graveyard, so to speak. It seems to point towards cooperation rather than "you different, me kill you". 🤣
@@BenjiQ575 It is true that that wouldnt have been a pretty sight to see, but from what we know the first burial sites where in relatively hot places, even for the times (reminding that it was during the ice age). The oldest burials we know of, the Neanderthal ones, are not in Europe but they're in the Middle East, very much in what is not Israel/Palestine, around 170 and 120 thousand years ago (Tabun cave). Id bounce this one back to you, what would you think would be worse, leaving someone out in a cave frozen and possibly chewed off, or rotting corpses in the middle eastern sun? We cant know for sure what moved the first hominids to burial, but we know where and when (kinda). Hope this helps! Sorry for not answering earlier :P
@@ellenbrooks8061 Yes! There is a not so small theory that basically says exactly this: we got burial and many other things (possibly even a rock chopping tecnique) from Neanderthals, and we just made it our own and in some cases developed it further. What happened between sapiens and neanderthals for sure we cant know, but from genetic studies and archeological finds it turns out that....its complicated! Probably some groups went along fine and even interbred, some others had problems and some others even went at war against eachother (We do not have direct evidence of sapiens/neanderthaliensis conflict but its not an absurd theory).
What we know is that when the first sapiens wandered out of Africa they reached the great crossroads that is the Middle East, where Neanderthals had already been for tens of thousands of years, and sapiens communities start showing burials in the paleoarcheologic record only after reaching places where there had already been neanderthal burial sites for thousands and thousands of years.
As a side note, Id like to talk about what I meant when I said "shared burial sites". Do not think of like one cave where both Neanderthals and sapiens put their dead one next to the other. Its more like, for theres a few thousands of years of overlap in burial sites (caves) used by both Neaderthal and sapiens that were part of the same cave system. Its like (gross oversimplification) if sapiens and neanderthals used different caves situated on opposing sites of the same mountain to put their respective dead. Its not exactly like one body next to the other, but if said cave system held some symbolic/sacred meaning for any of those two communities, enough to make those caves a burial site, they probably wouldnt have shared it with someone they didnt get along with. Theres much we dont know!
This is a great video, very informative, thanks for the research. I like the way you refuse to jump to conclusions, or some preconceived idea.
They’re so fascinating. I’m so glad Jean Auel introduced me to them. I gotta see the Lascaux 2 cave paintings.
Truly brilliant video! The quality is so impressive. Can't wait to see more of your content.
I believe these people were way more intelligent than most give them credit for.
They were more intelligent than people give them credit for
One of the most charming channels in the archaeology/paleontology field. Quite happy to subscribe to this goofball.
You narrated this perfectly like some kind of actor or story teller. I appreciate your well researched videos and your thrifty filming takes nothing from the integrity of the video.
I wonder if the fact that there are multiple bodies in some of their burial sites is evidence that tribes were compelled to bring their dead to specific sites after death. A body isn't all that easy to transport whole as any lone large game hunter can tell you. Is it possible that they simply broke down their dead to ease transport back to their compulsory burial site?
Stefan, given that Neanderthals were around for a few hundred thousand years, any idea as to how their physical appearance and culture may have evolved over all those millenniums? I would have to think that a ca. 250,000 BC Neanderthal would be somewhat different and live somewhat differently, then a ca. 40,000 BC one.
They were evolving like us, but at a slower rate and were inbred, anti social and not as smart/agile. So their story ended while ours was just starting to get even more interesting.
@@adrianmclaughlin9585 well they were intelligent , but you’re right about them leaving just as our story was getting interesting
@@adrianmclaughlin9585 wow. Watch a few more evolution videos, you make a few errors in your comment.
First time to this channel. Awesome video - I love the way you present the material so clearly and note each instance where nuance or hypothesis is taken. And how hilarious that tens of thousands of years ago Neanderthals would not have known that far in the future cousins/descendants of their species would be protecting their nudity on a retrospective on their existence. Reality is so so bizarre sometimes I just can't.
As my Chinese Mother In Law always said "No Waste!"
did you eat her in the end?
Is the skull you're holding a recreation? If so, where is it from?
You are so fun to watch! You should be awarded an honorary doctorate:)
Perhaps the neanderthals cannibalized were taken from a rival tribe and the ones that were likely buried are their fellow kin.
Perhaps they were just burying them to dig them up for later consumption/. Burying food can be a way to preserve it (probably not the case but interesting to think anyway)
BTW that neanderthal incased in stalagmite is one of the coolest, yet creepiest things I've seen.
Neanderthals never operated in tribes like humans, their social units were more akin to *troops*, similar to other apes like chimpanzees. Neanderthal troops were also small and lived isolated from one another so violent encounters would have been rare and counter productive.
@@sahulianhooligan7046 What about bands. Bands are smaller than tribes. And still exist in the Rainforest. They consist of a nuclear and extended family that hunt and gather but are not in a village hamlet.
@@covenawhite4855 Human bands still network with other bands of nearby regions in a reciprocal way. But Neanderthals kept to themselves in their small closely guarded territory and they seemed to be highly xenophobic.
@@sahulianhooligan7046 How would they find new mates? Surely they weren't just constantly breeding with close family members, right? I don't know how chimpanzee troops do it, maybe Neanderthals did it similarly?
Jaw falls off when little billy screams out...
“NO MOM, I WANT GRANDMAS RUMP ROAST, IM SICK OF RIBS”
Or maybe a Neanderthal buffalo bill?
😂
Skiddle-eee-do doesen't even begin to cover it! Nice work tho, thanks for sharing your interest in all things pre-historical.
The guy with just two teeth shown nicely at 6min 25 lost at least his upper incisors post mortem. He did indeed have advanced gum disease, his remaining teeth would have been quite mobile but he could probably manage food better than you suggest. Love your videos.
As always....Great video Stefan....loved it. With that said I have one point....This is the third video I have seen of late that says that the toothless old Neanderthals probably needed help chewing their food. I have dentures and no teeth and I regularly eat most everything without my teeth, including steak and some potato chips. There are only a few foods I avoid without my teeth.
It needs to be cut up more though. For example, if I have a hamburger, I have to chop up the onion slices and pickles.
Thanks for the video and congrats and good luck at being a dad!! You will b awesome. Thanks again for all the time and energy you put into your great videos!!
where did you source the neanderthal skull stereogram at 7:54 in? pretty cool 😎
Great stuff, well done my man👌🏼
This video is great but I will down vote out of principle due to lack of spoon.
There are zero downvotes, you sir, are a liar without principles.
@@KnowingBetter There's one now. Must be Trump did it.
@@KnowingBetter Thanks to whoever downvoted for giving me plausible deniability. Also please remove it because this video is great
There's no downvote in RUclips, go back to Reddit.
22 now
When you cross your eyes when looking at the double skulls, you can lock in on a 3D view, except with the left eye seeing the right image overlapping the right eye seeing the left image, the depth is inverted. So the front of the skull appears furthest away.
Congrats on the new addition!! Woop woop!
Your comments about evolution, depositing bodies into caves, and symbolism got me to thinking that may explain how caves became associated with the underworld/afterlife/dead things. Just a thought.
Well presented. It is important to keep an open mind.
Quality. Good end to a Friday night, cheers.
Just had a thought. Maybe bones defleshed and marrow removed to clean them so that the person could be more easily carried with the group when the moved around the landscape. Later sapiens often kept their dead close. Buried under the house floor, mummified and placed by the door etc. Bones being deposited later when maybe the fashion changed or the closer relatives themselves had died.
I find neanderthals really amazing and mysterious. So alike to us yet so different
I love your understated sarcastic style man! Coupled with awesome and informative content and analysis. Love the channel.
How refreshing to be presented with information without ridiculous presumption. The majority of anthropologists, upon mention of a scratch on a bone, would have flatly stated that Mildred was Thanksgiving dinner and that Uncle Newt knitted doilies. I’d given up hope that anyone was honest anymore.
Love the evolution videos! I vote an bonobo chimp video highlighting their behavioral differences, but with your cheeky commentary!
Hi! Nice Chanel, I would like to know if you create the drawings or who is the artist?
That's Ettore Mazza, I must have forgot to put his IG in the description. Will do it now.
I am outraged at the clarity of this presentation! How dare you.
That intro was phenomenal, I laughed so hard
Cool videos and channel, thank You very much.
Congrats...you will be an awesome dad! Never knew the Neanderthal invented the hashtag...I learn so much from your channel!!!
It is interesting that there are no finds that suggest cremations, at least I don't know of any. But of course you have to say that the bones would probably have been crushed and are therefore extremely difficult to find. For me, cremation is actually the most obvious method of burial. It might be interesting to examine Neanderthal deposits for such traces.
Oh damn, I actually learned the wrong profession. I would like to pursue this hypothesis.
A super interesting video, thanks. Good luck as a father, best wishes to your wife too.
It would take a high temperature, time and lots of wood/fuel to cremate.
Given the lack of trees and the need to migrate, maybe cremation was not the easiest option.
However, as you mention, bones could be crushed...so the possibility would be there.
As a funeral director, I find the funeral practices across time and cultures fascinating.
I can see the burrowing mouse and the flowers and seeds. What about the burial site with red ocher?
is this a peer reviewed video? I was wondering if this is safe to use in a bibliography
I think humans piled up their dead until they encountered their first great person. They said "this person is special. We can't just throw them with the rest"
That thought was the beginning of ritual burial
Interesting as always! Great artwork too. Is it custom made for the show?
Honey, what should we do tonight?
Let's have granny over for dinner!
Stefan Thank you. You do a great job on your videos.
Listening to you is way mo betta that falling asleep during NOVA. That's for sure. That's for Dang sure!!!
9:48 Hey, Altamura is 50km away from where I live! :D
I'm not from there but I really like that city. Great food, that incredible Neanderthal site... and there's even a fossilized beach!
With fossilized footprints from big herbivorous dinosaurs - over 200 dinos and 5 different species. A supposed migration happened there :D
Was the cut marks done by
Others in the tribe or animals?
Another great video. Thank you!
@@thc1237 I genuinely am. I'm grateful people that make and post content I enjoy. I wonder why your life is so bleak, you cant feel the same.
I appreciate you watching and giving positive comments. Sometimes the internet can be a very negative place!
...and for the soundtrack, check out Neoandertals. Estonian avant-garde brutal death metal focusing on the subject matter of neanderthals and their defleshing burial rites. Weird but tasty!
were these different Neanderthals from different areas of the world language,customs,and religion. like modern humans
We know for certain the Neanderthals did not leave the flowers on the grave at Shanidar because tests were done on the flowers and they were from varieties that did not exist yet when the Neanderthals died.
BEST CHANNEL EVERRR
Thank you sir👍👍👍👍👍
What its it, 4:00 p.m. over there? Well, here I just woke up. And I read, "How did NETHERLANDS Dispose of the Dead?" Which might not make a bad video, actually......
Hunebeds, we're famous for it.
That was jaw-dropping.
Perhaps that is why we love our grandparents, our genes still remember we ate them when they died, the neanderthals celebrated both easter, thanksgiving, christmas, new year and also grandparents funerals
The reason might be desperation. I'm one of those who believe that cave men didn't live in caves. Why should they choose somewhere damp, dark and cold when even light shelter outside was more comfortable?
And a recent analysis of children's teeth showing a brief period with a high lead content not only suggests the lead came from when they were in a cave but that cave stays were brief. What's being called cannibalism might be merely be desperation during a really cold winter that had forced them underground.
Michael W. Perry Well, as your hypothesis could be true, it’s unsupported by the evidence.
Congrats papi milo!!
A dark and mysterious land called Belgium. 🤣🤣🤣
My questions are, did they have fur? Or were those finger ridges that modern apes have from hanging on to their mothers caused by fur clothing? Although the evidence for neanderthal clothing is tenuous at best.
Does the size of their eyes and larger brain mean they were nocturnal?
Ive read that there is a shared neanderthal/wolf burial/village site, some of the first evidence of human/canine cooperation. Please expand on this. Because ive also read that it was the homo sapien/wolf-dog alliance (both species were competitors to neanderthals) that finally allowed the competitive advantage homo sapiens needed to spread into europe.
There is a Papua new guinean tribe that defleshes their dead so they can get old pop's bones out for social occasions
Why are artists depictions of neanderthals nearly always clean shaven?
Best of luck to you and yours
Adam
0:40 ...wait, what?
They were probably appreciative of beautiful things...rocks, flowers, nature..Artist were of a higher thinking...but who is to say they didn’t learn to appreciate patterns and color.
Can you do a video of you drop kicking one of their skulls like it's a soccer ball? I'm curious to see what happens
ever consider they practiced something akin to sky burial?
After these and a couple of cold beers it's always the same, a 3-5 hour Dawn of man marathon lol.
Now this right here. Is content
Oddly specific and probably highly controversial thiught:
What if the small animals were buried with the Neanderthals as a type of headstone. Like an elder dies and they catch a small songbird kill it and bury it with them as a similar action to, “here lies Robin, loved mother”
Are we able to know if the people who ate the bodies were of the same clan or whatever? Essentially, whether they ate grandma, or if they attacked a rival group and ate them, rather than their “own”? That could explain the ages maybe?
Is there a way to answer that question with available evidence? 🧐
I wonder if the cannibals were like they were portrayed in Quest for Fire! A great movie, but of course, the main characters were early Homo Sapiens, but some tribes were cannibals, and not for religious purposes!
As soon as I saw this I jumped to watch it. I really like your videos. I'm glad you didn't use the spoon this time - otherwise we might have subconsciously imply that we ate them... Which I've always wondered as they'd be a great source of protein.
Humans are actually a rather risky, dangerous prey. They fight back, there's not much meat on them, and you're better off cooperating with them than hunting them.
What about Sky burial?
How many weird looks did you get carrying around a skull at that cemetery ??
like not all humans are the same, maybe Neanderthals where very diverse on how they treated their dead.
First song? I hear OS Runescape gameplay samples.
I appreciate the work you put into these videos, thanks. Congratulations on the soon to arrive anklebiter. Good luck with that.
"Grandma makes good roast!"
"Yeah, but I kind of miss her."
I’m kinda curious how long it takes to bury a body with the given stone tools they had. Like I could see as too time consuming most of the time.
You might be surprised how good a solid stick can dig into the right soils even when roughly fashioned.
This can be seen with modern hunter gatherers when digging for tubers or breaking open animals burrows and termite nests.
Is there no evidence of balms or ointments or other substances applied to the remains or found in the soil? I daresay there'd be other clues to cross-reference this and debunk or support, but the first thing that popped to my head were those depictions of shamanistic pre-agricultural societies that prepared bodily remains in different ways (head-hunting, taking finger bones and hanging them around a neck, using a long bone of a corpse as a special spiritual tool like a sceptre) so what if the cave was used as a spiritual place? What if they either took them there before or shortly after they died, and used the cave as a place to either commune with these dead neanderthals or prepare or administer them in some way to facilitate their journey into death? The strange removal of the face and weird percussion marks could be a kind of belief system where removing the skin of the face allows the soul to emerge and be released from the corpse. Perhaps the percussion marks were done after the face was removed to, like, "knock on the door" to get the spirit to wake up and get out of the corpse?
I have absolutely zero evidence, this is entirely speculation on my part by someone with zero academic credibility, just wondering aloud, but I have a feeling that if they weren't consuming the flesh in the same way they were consuming other animals there's only a handful of reasons for that.
Also, another question wondering aloud, do we think that maybe burial originated as a custom in colder climates because if you leave a corpse in the cold, it lasts much much longer and that might be unsettling for individuals of the species to walk around seeing their dead friend's face get slowly chewed off in the days and weeks following their death, so to avoid having to face that, they bury or administer it, and to help them get through the grisly process, they invented religious reasons to tell the younger ones to make it easier to deal with.
To be fair to the Persian jird, a Neanderthal graveyard is probably the most metal place possible to make your burrow
Id say that it is advantageous to hide or bury the dead, hence they probably did it. 1. To not to attract predatory animals to their location. 2. To avoid leaving traces of their movements to other groups/homo sapiens etc. (assuming they might be hostile in some way) - Makes sense right?
I don’t want to offend you but You do not understand what The difference between private property and personal property
private property is the private ownership of the means of production of goods and services such as factories farms and shops
On the other hand personal property is your personal belongings such as your house your tent your tools your clothing.
The fact that humans and Neanderthal interbred, you would think that cultural practices would also cross over.
@Super-i
?
@Super-i what??? So rape??? There is no proof of this!!! Prove it!!!
It's crazy to me that they would even want to breed with each other. I mean, wouldn't it sort of be like a chimp tryin to mate with a gorilla? I'm not trying to be crass, but they were different in so many ways I just don't get it.
@@automnejoy5308 They weren't really too different from us. It would be like a horse mating with a donkey. Similar but different
@@safron2442 True... the ultimate evidence is that they were able to produce fertile offspring. So, yeah, they must not have been that different. Still, though... When you think that different ethnic groups of our same species often hate and distrust each other and look down on "mixed race" babies and marriages even today in 2020, it blows my mind that different *species* of human were widely breeding millennia ago.
great video
if neanderthal were eating their own then we were also eating our own at that time cuz neaderthal were at the top of the food chain . only thing we would have done is followed them - same lifestyle . some tribe still do culturally i think ??
Love that intro!
Review the chippie joint!!!