The discoveries about the Neanderthals continue to debunk the myths about this human species, which are more elaborate than previously thought. They cared for their sick, they created abstract art, they practiced rituals, they ate seafood. They worked together in large groups and developed strategies. It’s almost certain they talked. And some of that stays in our genes, about 2%, because the two species have mated more than once. Two documentaries defend this community that mysteriously died out 40,000 years ago, the day before yesterday, and whose last specimens were found in Gibraltar.
In How were the Neandertals?, a 2020 US and Canadian production (on Movistar+), we follow paleontologists and other experts as they follow in their footsteps and try to discover their abilities based on them. For a long time his paintings were attributed to the Sapiens, but today we know that they were his work; Some of these creations clearly indicate a symbolic thought. We visited the first known human construction made of stalagmites in Bruniquel Cave (France); It doesn’t seem to have been an easy task. A javelin champion checks the quality of his javelins. And most strikingly, we meet the scientists at the Max Planck Institute who are experimenting with something like mini-brains made from stem cells into which they’ve injected certain Neanderthal genes: they’re called organoids, and they’re the size of a pea. These experts point to certain yet-to-be-proven connections between some of our traits (from addiction to autism syndrome, through certain immunities or type 2 diabetes) to the heredity of our sister species. We don’t yet know when the daring experiment will end, because it will be lengthy: They plan to implant these brainwaves in small robots in order to observe their behavior.
The Neanderthals: Meet Your Ancestors mini-series is a 2018 British production presented by paleoanthropologist and popularizer Ella Al-Shamahi, who broadcast La Otra de Telemadrid. The first chapter is dedicated to the careful reconstruction of the appearance of these men, women and children from the remains, 3D images and simulations performed by a stuntman and an actor: Andy Serkis (Gollum in The Lord of the Rings). At the end we see a Neanderthal among us on the subway: that’s not too out of place either. The way to this picture is a bit long.
The second and final episode is more compelling because it focuses on the mysteries surrounding these other people. He searches for traces of a conflict with the Sapiens that explains their disappearance, but does not come to any firm conclusions as to whether our ancestors massacred them, although he states it is likely. Its small and scattered population could not withstand an attack by larger groups. The end in Gibraltar points to another cause of the extinction: the climate crisis, in this case due to cooling. They tried to move south and the North African coast was in sight. But they did not master the navigation that would serve the Sapiens to expand across the planet; It was around this time that they arrived in Australia.
Very good questions are raised in the last part of the documentary. Can we one day bring this species back to life with the advances in DNA editing that have been discussed? There are already projects to do this with the mammoth (of which there are better preserved specimens): it’s called extinction. But the revived Neanderthals, no matter how multiracial they were, would face an unprecedented hurdle. They would be human, if not like us; Definitely folks, right? We wouldn’t lock them up in a Jurassic Park-style zoo for the rich. Given the history of cruelty and racism that modern people carry with them, there is no guarantee that the process would turn out well, that they would be well accepted, or that their integration would be easy. So the big question is not whether we can do it, that can only be answered with time. It’s when we have to.
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