We Weren't the Only Humans. So Why Are We the Last? #sciencedocumentary #humanevolution #minidoc

For most of your species' history, you were never the only humans on Earth. Around 50,000 years ago, at least four other kinds of humans were still alive — Neanderthals, Denisovans, the tiny people of Flores and the climbers of Luzon — and then, one by one, they were gone. The question of why only Homo sapiens remains has no settled answer, and the pieces of it are stranger than the old story of the smarter species that simply won. ───────────────────────────── CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 0:38 Never Alone in the Dark 1:01 The Species That Remained 1:57 Ghosts in Our DNA 3:43 A Story Once Told Wrong 4:11 What the Genome Revealed 6:57 Why Did We Survive? 11:09 The Answer Nobody Likes 13:21 The Silence That Remains ───────────────────────────── This video follows the evidence for the other human species that shared the planet with us, from the Denisovan finger bone in Siberia sequenced by Svante Pääbo's team to the Neanderthal genome published by Richard Green and colleagues in 2010. It explores the archaic ancestry still carried in living people, including the Denisovan EPAS1 gene in Tibetans and the ghost lineage found in West African genomes, and then weighs the leading hypotheses for why Homo sapiens was the one that remained: climate instability, small population size and accumulated mutations, cultural networks, genetic absorption, and plain chance. It also looks at Homo erectus, the longest-lasting human species, as a reminder of how fragile survival really is. ───────────────────────────── PRIMA FLAME — What history forgot to tell you. New video every week. Subscribe to never miss one. ───────────────────────────── #PrimaFlame #humanevolution #neanderthals #denisovans #science