How Did They Survive? | Life as a Neanderthal, 42,000 BC

For three hundred thousand years, a people survived European ice with fire, glue and each other. Then, in the space of a few thousand years, they were gone — and one to two percent of them is still here, inside almost everyone watching this. This is seven days in the Vézère valley in south-west France, about 42,000 BC, told through six people from one band of twenty: a hunter whose shoulder has been wrong since he was sixteen, a woman who makes glue by holding bark at three hundred and forty degrees inside a sealed mound she cannot see into, an old man with one working arm and one eye who has been fed by other people for eleven years, a mother, a traveller who walks two hundred and forty kilometres to a coast and comes home with shells and black feathers, and a woman who has not slept a full night in nineteen years because the fire must not go out. And on the seventh day, the thing the genetics guarantee happened: they meet somebody else. Everything around these people came out of the ground. The healed fractures. The birch tar with a fingerprint still in it. The eagle talons with cut marks, a hundred and thirty thousand years old. The rings of broken stalagmite three hundred metres inside a cave. The layer of Homo sapiens tools lying between two Neanderthal layers in a rock shelter in the Rhône valley. CHAPTERS 0:00 What Everyone Thinks They Know 0:55 The Vézère Valley, 42,000 BC 1:50 Day One — The Hunter 6:47 Five Thousand Calories a Day 10:42 Twenty Seconds in a Ravine 13:25 Reading the Ground 18:12 Four Hundred Kilos to Carry 21:16 Yarrow and Chamomile 26:15 Day Two — Three Hundred and Forty Degrees 32:06 The Work Nobody Puts in a Museum 38:24 Smaller Than an Egg 43:10 Day Three — The Old Man 46:49 Somebody Fed Him for Eleven Years 52:30 Rings of Stone in the Dark 58:20 Day Four — The Mother 1:02:42 A Childhood Written in Teeth 1:10:21 Pigment on a Wall, 64,000 Years Ago 1:14:51 Day Five — The Traveller 1:17:50 The Shore at Gibraltar 1:23:52 Feathers, at Forty Sites 1:29:47 Day Six — The Fire That Never Went Out 1:39:01 Did They Talk? 1:43:19 They Were Already Here 1:47:11 Day Seven — The Meeting 1:50:24 The Blade He Could Not Make 1:54:07 How It Actually Ended 1:57:56 One to Two Percent 2:06:03 The Valley That Gave Them Their Name 2:08:01 Family SOURCES Shanidar Cave, northern Iraq — Shanidar 1, blind in the left eye from a crushing facial injury, with a withered right arm, healed fractures and bony growths in both ear canals severe enough to cause profound hearing loss. He lived into his forties. Excavation resumed at the site in 2018 and recovered an articulated skeleton in a deliberate depression. Königsaue, Germany — two lumps of birch tar, one carrying a fingerprint, about 44,000 years old. Producing the tar requires bark held near 340°C with the oxygen excluded; experimental archaeologists needed years of failed attempts to reproduce it. Krapina, Croatia — eight white-tailed eagle talons from at least three birds, with cut marks and polished facets, about 130,000 years old. Cut-marked raptor and corvid wing bones turn up at more than forty European sites. El Sidrón, Spain — yarrow and chamomile in dental calculus, both bitter and both without food value, alongside cooked starch grains. Bruniquel Cave, southern France — rings of broken stalagmite three hundred metres from the entrance, with traces of fire, dated to 176,000 years ago. The oldest known built structure in the world. Grotte Mandrin, Rhône valley — a layer of Homo sapiens tools between Neanderthal layers, around 54,000 years ago. Gorham's Cave and the Gibraltar sites — mussels, limpets, pine nuts, tortoise, birds, seal and dolphin in Neanderthal levels, and among the last places they are found anywhere. Scladina Cave, Belgium — barium in a molar recording exclusive nursing for about seven months, and two winter lead exposures. The first draft Neanderthal genome was published in 2010. Svante Pääbo received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022. MORE TIME WARP CITIES New reconstructions every week. Subscribe so you do not miss the next one. #Neanderthal #IceAge #HistoryDocumentary