THE END OF THE NEANDERTHALS: The STRONGEST Humans That Ever Lived | Full Documentary

In a cave in northern Iraq, archaeologists found the skeleton of a man who should never have survived to adulthood. He was blind in one eye. His right arm had been lost above the elbow. His leg was crippled. He was about forty years old when he died. Every one of those injuries had healed — which means he lived for years, perhaps decades, unable to hunt, unable to run, unable to feed himself, in the middle of the Ice Age. Somebody kept him alive. He was a Neanderthal, and he died around 45,000 years ago. For a century and a half we called them failures. Brutish, stooping, dim-witted — a first draft of humanity, rightly swept aside. The word became an insult. All of it was wrong, and it came very largely from one arthritic skeleton and one scientist's mistake in 1908. Neanderthals had brains as large as ours or larger. They made fire, glue, composite tools and ornaments. They cared for their injured for decades. They buried their dead. They survived Ice Age Europe for 350,000 years — three times longer than our own species has managed so far. And they did not disappear. They are inside you. In this documentary you will discover: • Shanidar 1: the one-armed, half-blind Neanderthal who survived for decades because his people carried him • How Marcellin Boule's 1908 reconstruction of an arthritic old man defined the "brute" image for a century • Birch bark tar — a multi-stage chemical process Neanderthals were using long before we arrived • Why their injury pattern matches that of RODEO RIDERS • The Bruniquel cave structures: something built 176,000 years ago, 300m underground, in total darkness • What CT scans and dental plaque reveal about their diet, their medicine and their illnesses • The contested claim that Neanderthals painted cave walls 20,000 years before we got to Europe • The Denisovan girl whose mother was a Neanderthal and whose father was not • Why the "war of extermination" theory has essentially no evidence behind it • Why 1-2% of your genome is Neanderthal — and what those genes are still doing 📚 KEY SOURCES: • Trinkaus, E. — "The Shanidar Neandertals"; and Trinkaus & Zimmerman on the Shanidar 1 injuries • Pääbo, S. et al. — the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Nobel Prize 2022) • Green, R. E. et al. (2010) — "A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome" (Science) • Slon, V. et al. (2018) — the first-generation Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid, Denisova Cave (Nature) • Pomeroy, E., Hunt, C., Reynolds, T. et al. — the renewed Shanidar excavations and Shanidar Z, University of Cambridge / Liverpool John Moores • Hublin, J.-J. et al. — dating of the Neanderthal-modern human overlap in Europe • Higham, T. et al. (2014) — "The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance" (Nature) • Hoffmann, D. L. et al. (2018) — U-Th dating of Iberian cave art (Science); and the published critiques of it • Jaubert, J. et al. (2016) — the Bruniquel Cave structures (Nature) • Hardy, K. et al. (2017) — dental calculus from El Sidrón (Nature) • Rendu, W. et al. (2014) — evidence for burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints (PNAS) • Wragg Sykes, R. — "Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art" (Bloomsbury) • Stringer, C. — Natural History Museum, London; the AHOB project Subscribe for more full-length documentaries on the forgotten chapters of our world. 🔔 Hit the bell so you never miss an episode. Images: Ana Majkić; Арнаутова Анастасия; Clumsystiggy; Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service; The Portable Antiquities Scheme; José Ramos-Muñoz; North Lincolnshire Museum; Leicestershire County Council (CC BY) - Wikimedia Commons #Neanderthals #HumanEvolution #Prehistory #IceAge #Archaeology #AncientDNA #Palaeoanthropology #Shanidar #LostEras