Why Are We The Only Humans Left?

Fifty thousand years ago you could walk over a hill and see smoke from a fire you did not light, made by people who were not your kind of people. There were at least four kinds of human alive at the same time - Neanderthals in Europe, Denisovans spread across Asia, two small species on islands in the Pacific, and us. That was ordinary. It has not been ordinary for forty thousand years. Nobody is certain why the others went and we stayed, and the four serious explanations still do not agree with each other. This is what happened to the other humans - and the parts of them that are still inside you. TIMESTAMPS 1:28: Three and a Half Feet Tall 2:57: Close to Two Tonnes of Stone 5:10: Family Comes from Papua New Guinea 7:47: Estimates for the Whole Neanderthal Population 9:36: When Your Immune System Meets Something It 10:59: Next Time Somebody Says Humans SOURCES Denny, the Neanderthal/Denisovan girl - Slon et al., Nature 2018 https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158... The rings deep inside Bruniquel Cave - Jaubert et al., Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/natur... A Denisovan jaw from the Tibetan Plateau - Chen et al., Nature 2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158... High-altitude adaptation in Tibetans came from Denisovans - Huerta-Sanchez et al., Nature 2014 https://www.nature.com/articles/natur... Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in living people - Vernot et al., Science 2016 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s... Shanidar Cave and the flower burial - Pomeroy et al., Antiquity 2020 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa... Neanderthal disappearance by genetic dilution - Scientific Reports 2025 https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159... Where the evidence disagrees, this video says so. DISCLAIMER This video is for educational purposes. The other kinds of human left very little behind - Denisovans are known almost entirely from DNA and a handful of bone fragments - so parts of this are reconstructed from archaeology and genetics rather than observed directly. Several claims in this story are still argued about by specialists, including the Shanidar flower burial and the reasons for the Neanderthal disappearance, and the video says so where that is the case instead of picking the tidier answer. The animation is illustrative, not a literal record of events. #ancienthumans #prehistory #humanevolution #neanderthals #denisovans #stoneage #anthropology #history #earlyhumans #evolution