Neanderthals.
We always believed they were just knuckle-dragging ape men,
that they were the inferior prototype to us - modern humans,
and that about 40,000 years ago, they shuffled off into extinction.
But now, the latest scientific research
is showing that the Neanderthals didn't really disappear.
In fact, they live on inside us.
Scientists have discovered that most of us - me, him,
most people living today,
carry Neanderthal DNA inside of us,
and the only way that could have happened is if somewhere, somehow,
Neanderthals and early modern humans were having children together.
The latest findings show that our Neanderthal heritage
still has a profound impact on us.
And it's affecting our skin, it's affecting our immune system,
it's affecting our risk for cancer.
So I'm on a mission to unlock the secrets
of these mysterious ancestors of ours.
We'll be using the fossil evidence to build
the most scientifically-accurate CGI Neanderthal ever created.
This could be the face of your great, great,
times 2,000, great-grandfather.
Some of my mates would date him.
We'll discover how strong and adaptable they were,
how intelligent they were, and even whether they could talk.
COMPUTERISED VOICE: Uhr, eee, ooo.
And then, armed with all the knowledge,
we'll be turning to state-of-the-art Hollywood technology.
We've asked Andy Serkis, the pioneering actor
and king of motion-capture animation,
to take on a new role and become a Neanderthal.
With the combination of art and science,
we'll see Neanderthals as never before.
It turns out the Neanderthals were stronger, smarter, faster,
better looking and much, much more like us than we ever thought.
I'm Ella Al-Shamahi.
I study Neanderthals, and I'm on a mission.
Over the last few decades, paleoanthropologists
and archaeologists have discovered that Neanderthals
weren't the knuckle-dragging ape men of popular imagination.
In fact, they were related to us.
I want to show you what they were really like
by bringing Neanderthals back from the dead,
and to do that, we're going to be combining
the latest scientific research and cutting-edge Hollywood animation.
And that magic happens through here.
This studio is designed for creating digital characters
for film and television.
But now we've brought together a new cast of characters.
The world's foremost Neanderthal scientists.
They're going to work with the Hollywood actor
who brought us Gollum in Lord of the Rings - Andy Serkis.
With the experts' help, he and his team of motion-capture artists
are going to try to create the most realistic representation
of a Neanderthal ever seen.
So, I'm the everyman in this.
And I suppose my experience of working with...
You know, building characters for apes and gorillas for King Kong
and so on and so forth, so I'm fascinated to see how Neanderthals
are now that we have a lot of new information and data and science.
We want to find out how they behave, how they move, how they present,
how they walk, how they fight.
And I believe that we, amongst us all,
can come up with a fairly accurate representation.
Under the watchful eyes of our experts,
Andy's team's first task is to learn how Neanderthals walked.
Through the magic of motion-capture, their every movement is tracked
and instantly translated to become the lifelike motion
of our computer-generated Neanderthal avatars.
But for our creations to be accurate,
we need to base them on real Neanderthals.
Individuals who lived and died tens of thousands of years ago.
To find them, I travel to the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq.
This was once the heart of Neanderthal territory.
After splitting from the early human populations in Africa
about 600,000 years ago,
the ancestors of Neanderthals moved north,
and eventually spread right across western Asia and Europe.
Western Asia may also have been one of the first places
that modern humans encountered Neanderthals
when they migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago.
And in the heart of that region,
just on the border of Iraq and Turkey, is the Shanidar Cave.
It's one of the richest Neanderthal fossil sites ever discovered.
Every year, paleoanthropologists from all over the world
come to dig here.
But the major discoveries were made in the 1950s,
when the remains of about ten Neanderthals were found.
And I want to use those fossils as the basis for our recreation.
The skeleton I'm really interested in
was the first one found here in 1957.
It's called Shanidar 1.
So he was lying just here, so with
his head just where that sort of deeper excavation is there,
with his head poking out of this section.
Shanidar 1 was an adult male Neanderthal.
We think his skeleton lay undisturbed in the cave
for 60,000 years
before it was excavated and removed to the Baghdad Museum.
But I've kind of got a surprise for you.
I've brought him home.
We got a cast of Shanidar 1's skull and I'm calling him Ned,
Ned the Neanderthal.
And we're going to be bringing this guy to life.
The first step in reanimating Ned is to find out what he looked like.
So I brought his skull to Scotland to see what the forensic experts
at the University of Dundee make of it.
Chris Rynn usually works on the victims of violent crime.
He's an expert in facial reconstruction,
and he's the perfect man to work on Ned
because he's used to working with only skeletal remains.
The thing about Scotland is there's lots of water.
There's lots of water.
It's nothing to do with crime rate, necessarily,
because if there's a murder inland, the body gets discovered
while it's still potentially identifiable.
But if you drop a body in water, it becomes a skeleton fairly quickly.
Chris's reconstruction work is renowned the world over,
from Scotland Yard to the FBI.
He's played a vital role in solving many murder
and missing persons cases and now
he's going to help us give Ned a face.
He starts by laser scanning the skull to create a 3-D model
that he can work with on his computer.
The first thing I did was set the eyeballs in the skull.
With floating orbits.
Yes.
Really disconcerting, just these two eyeballs just floating around.
This is a skull with big brow ridge, deep-set eyes,
so there's going to be overhang on the upper eyelid.
As well as the heavy brow,
the skull also has a much more prominent jaw than a modern human.
To see how that affected the face,
Chris starts by adding layers of muscle.
On the sides of the face here, we've got the largest muscles in the head
and these are the muscles of mastication.
Which are the chewing muscles. Yeah, exactly.
And on this skull there are much stronger muscle attachments
than on a modern skull.
As he starts to build up the muscles,
it becomes clear that there are some major anatomical differences
between Neanderthal faces and our own.
Every muscle I brought in and all the facial features that I bought in
from modern samples,
I had to enlarge by 10% or 15%, except the ears.
The ears were smaller, if anything. That's a weird combination.
There's a lot we can tell about the nose from the skull.
The shape of the nose at the tip here, at a certain angle,
superimposes and echoes the shape of the bridge of the nose at the top.
It's quite large. It's quite bulbous.
It takes 25 hours of work
before Chris is finally able to reveal Ned's face.
A face that hasn't been seen for around 60,000 years.
He actually looks quite normal.
Modern?
Kind of. I'm actually really surprised.
I would have thought he would have...
He would have looked a little bit more alien, I suppose.
If he walked past on the street, I'm not sure I'd be shocked, you know.
I... If...
He could... He could pass for human.
Some of my mates would date him. LAUGHTER
You know, Ned is a Scottish acronym... Really?
..for non-educated delinquent,
so the sort of young teenage hoodie.
SHE LAUGHS
That's amazing. They're Neds.
Chris's model is a great start, but there's more to a face than anatomy.
To see what this enigmatic human ancestor really looked like,
we need to give Ned a personality,
and that requires the application of art as well as science.
This is where the incredible Dutch paleoartists
and identical twin brothers Alfons and Adrie Kennis come in.
They're renowned for creating scientifically accurate
but also incredibly lifelike sculptures of ancient humans.
Their models of Neanderthals are in displays around the world.
At London's Natural History Museum,
renowned Neanderthal expert Professor Chris Stringer
is rightly proud of his own Kennis brothers model.
That is actually a really small Neanderthal.
So this is based on the Neanderthal from Spy in Belgium.
He happens to be about the smallest male Neanderthal.
We've got a bit of a wimp, really,
by Neanderthal standards, but I love his face.
He's got a fantastic face, full of character, and that's what
the Kennis brothers really have got here - real personality.
It's interesting that that facial expression,
the Kennis brothers told me, came from a photo of Sean Connery.
Sean Connery, but with a slightly dishevelled beard.
I think he needs some grooming. He does need a bit of grooming.
Chris, why do you think the Kennis brothers are in so many museums?
Well, their reputation is based on the quality of the work they do.
You know, they do really start from the basics.
They know the anatomy, they know the musculature,
they've dissected animals, and so they've got all that background,
and of course, on top of all that, they really are artists
who put in those finishing touches to the people
that make them real people, so they have real expressions,
they have real personalities and character. They do a great job.
They sound like the perfect people to bring Ned to life.
So I went to the Netherlands to meet them.
What is this room?
This room is where we work, where we do the reconstructions,
and also we have made casts of all kinds of mammals
and kind of fossil skulls.
My first reconstruction of a Neanderthal was when I was seven.
And I don't have it here.
It's in a box, but I have a real reconstruction,
with all Neanderthal features included already.
The first time, we were young,
we saw pictures from transition from ape to man,
and how face can morph from a human face to an ape face.
We were fascinated by it.
This is a typical guy from 5,000 years ago in Europe.
And it looks like us.
Small, round skull. Round face.
Very big chin. Big chin.
But now you see this. This is a Neanderthal.
If you compare this... Put them together like that.
Look. Who looks more mean?
LAUGHTER
Although the brothers mostly work on static models,
snapshots of Neanderthals frozen in time,
I wanted to ask their advice on what we should do
to make our living version of Ned as realistic as possible.
People want to have a reconstruction they can engage with,
so there has to be a little bit more than just a face, you know?
So we had to do more and that's put in character.
So, how to make Ned sympathetic?
How to make him real, because he's an old.... an older...
Has to be...
Why it has to be sympathetic? Why?
Maybe it was a very... "Oh, my God. That's Ned from the cave next-door."
"Oh, that guy!" Maybe he was a very nasty guy.
Nasty Ned? But why... Nasty Ned!
Nasty Ned!
Using the Kennis brothers' advice, our animators can take
Chris Rynn's forensic facial reconstruction and add the details -
the skin textures and wrinkles that add expression
and turn Nasty Ned into a real person
with the face of a living Neanderthal.
But there needs to be more to Ned than just his face.
If we're going to create a living, breathing,
moving Neanderthal, we need to give him a body.
Despite all the Neanderthal bones we've found, we've never actually
found a complete Neanderthal skeleton anywhere,
and the bones we do have come from individuals of all shapes and sizes.
But by carefully comparing and analysing the bones,
we've actually got a really good idea of the Neanderthal build
and how it would have compared to ours.
Back in the studio, we asked our experts to use their knowledge
of Neanderthal bones to build Ned a skeleton.
This is a modern human, and this is a Neanderthal.
Wow. So maybe it's time to talk about the differences.
I mean, can you see...? Well, obviously, I can see...
The biggest different is the ribcage seems to be
expanded at the bottom and pointing out like that.
They are relatively short and squat,
wide-bodied, and also a more forwardly-projecting chest.
Mike, can we get that one changed?
Combining all the fossil evidence, we can begin to see
how the Neanderthals' body shape was different from our own.
Neanderthals were shorter - about five foot four on average,
but were much more powerfully built.
I mean, Neanderthals were almost about 20% as wide as they were tall.
I think the pelvis has got to be wider
and I think you'd see, sort of, a more barrel chest overall,
wide shoulders, very physical, short, squat.
Somebody who could wrestle you to the ground easily.
Once we have the dimensions of the skeleton correct,
it is clothed in the computer-generated Neanderthal body,
which will become the basis for Ned.
But now we need to get Ned and his female friend Nelly moving.
OK, so can we actually, possibly get one of our avatars skipping?
Yes, I think we should try that.
LAUGHTER
OK, so if you were to both do it together...
Very happy Neanderthals coming back from a mammoth hunt.
I mean, Nick, if you were to skip as Nick.
LAUGHTER
And now go into rolling the shoulders a little bit forward.
Not too much, but just a little.
So do we think that's anywhere near
or do we think just that's Nick as Nick doing it?
I think Nick as Nick is going to be the closest.
Is closest to it? Yeah.
Crucially, because the avatars are built around the proportions
and mechanics of actual Neanderthals,
they don't move exactly like the actors do.
They move like Neanderthals.
By studying the biomechanics of their skeletons,
anthropologists have been able to work out
exactly what they could and couldn't have done.
And once again, the science turns the ape man stereotype on its head
because it turns out Neanderthals could do almost anything
modern humans can.
So what do we think is happening to him at this moment in time?
Like, he's in the cave...
He's in the cave all alone. Yeah. He doesn't think anyone's watching.
Dr Tara Chapman has spent eight years studying Neanderthal motion.
The bones, they behave in a way very similar
to the way a modern human would behave.
One thing about break dancing, if Neanderthals did do it,
they would have probably been very good at it,
because it requires a lot of upper body strength.
APPLAUSE
Can we have a look at the kick boxing?
I'm not sure Neanderthals would have actually kick-boxed like that.
As in, I'm sure that's quite a new movement that they would have done.
But all we're looking at is different ranges of movement
and saying Neanderthals would have been able to do this.
Why don't we get Nick and Cecily to actually demonstrate for us, then?
Then we can see on the avatar... Oh, yeah, look at that. Wow.
Amazing.
They look like two humans in a martial arts fight.
We're now getting a sense of how Ned and Nelly would have moved.
But to create a truly lifelike Neanderthal,
we need to know a lot more.
We need to put skin and muscle on the bones.
And to find out how big and strong Ned be should be,
we need to go back to the fossil evidence.
I'm fascinated to know about their strength
and how you measure that strength and where you get your data from.
Yeah, if only we had a humerus here.
Here's one we prepared earlier.
More than 40,000 years earlier!
Where is the humerus?
Oh, the humerus is this bone of the arm. The arm bone.
So there is a strong difference between this Neanderthal humerus
and this recent, modern humerus.
The bones in general, they are bigger, they are wider diameters,
and if you look at the ridges on the bone
where all the muscles are inserted, they're very strong.
The radius, the outside bone of the forearm,
is more curved in Neanderthals
and that gives a broader attachment area
for the muscles that flex the wrist and flex of the fingers.
The thickness of the bones tells us that Ned
must have been incredibly strong and muscular.
And now we can start building that strength
into the way our Neanderthals will move.
How would we demonstrate in physical terms the strength of a Neanderthal?
How do you demonstrate more muscle?
Well, I would weight that person down
so they've got some tension to fight against.
I mean, these are just like normal jogging weights.
We use them quite a lot
because they're a great way of translating to an avatar character.
I mean, that already is starting to give some tension, I think,
if you look at the avatar on the screen.
We've now accumulated enough evidence for our team of animators
to start work on converting the motion-capture footage
into high-quality graphic versions of our Neanderthals.
Knowing what Ned looked like, how strong he was and how he moved,
it's getting easier to see how he could have been my ancestor.
He's nothing like the thuggish ape-man stereotype.
But to understand why the Neanderthals
were built so differently from us,
we need to insert our animations into their natural environment.
And when we see them in the harsh conditions of Ice Age Europe,
we can begin to see how brilliantly adapted they were.
The climate was fluctuating very rapidly, every few thousand years,
from being, outside of Africa, nearly as warm as the present day,
to bitterly cold.
Some of these changes we know from data from ice cores
and pollen cores, some of these changes happened
probably in ten years or less, so extremely unstable environment.
So we've put down some big gym mats to show the depth of the snow,
so that you get the real physics of the foot pushing through the snow.
They've got weights on their legs and they're going through snow.
And now they've made it across to... Spain.
LAUGHTER You see?
You know, this may be the stereotypical idea,
but you have to keep in mind they probably encountered a lot of snow.
For a lot of the climatic periods that the Neanderthals' existed,
Europe was probably covered in snow - large parts of Europe.
Many of the Neanderthal's characteristic features
were probably adaptations to the cold.
Their short, squat shape reduced how much heat they would lose,
and their bulbous noses may have been adapted to warm and moisten
the cold, dry air as they breathed in.
But to truly visualise the Neanderthals,
we need to see them as they would have lived,
and so we want to reconstruct a key feature of Neanderthal life -
a hunt.
To do that realistically, we need to find out
everything we can about Neanderthal hunting behaviour.
So I went to snowy Boston to meet Neanderthal locomotion expert,
Dan Lieberman.
Neanderthals were beautifully
and elegantly adapted to their environment
and we were beautifully
and elegantly adapted to our environment.
Imagine being a Neanderthal living in Arctic Europe.
Just think about how hard it is for the Inuit today
to live in Arctic conditions,
and the technology required to live up there is just extraordinary.
Erm, so Neanderthals weren't living in sort of Arctic tundra,
they were living in, kind of, forested environments.
They're still environments that are really lacking in resources.
It's a challenging place to live.
To meet those challenges, Neanderthals would have needed
to develop warm clothing to cope with the freezing temperatures,
and they also would have needed to find new ways to catch their food.
In the warmth of Africa, early humans had developed
a technique called persistence hunting.
When we run, we cool by sweating.
Most animals can only cool by panting,
and so in persistence hunting what happens is that the hunter
will chase the animal, the animal will run away as fast as it can,
faster than the hunter can possibly run.
It'll go hide in the bushes.
But then the hunter tracks the animal, often by walking.
They're not running the whole time. They track the animal, find it,
and if they can get to the animal before it's cooled down
and then chase it again, that animal's body heat goes up
and eventually that animal overheats and collapses from hypothermia.
And at that point, the hunter can just walk up to the animal
and kill the animal.
But you can't do it unless you're in a hot environment and it's open.
That's the problem with the Neanderthals,
because where are they? They're in a cold environment,
and so they're not going to be able
to chase animals into the ground with persistence hunting.
So Neanderthals needed to develop a different strategy,
and back in the studio John Stewart of Bournemouth University
is helping us model Neanderthal hunting tactics.
Their hunting was, kind of, encounter hunting.
So you can't hunt, erm... at great distance like modern humans do
through woodland because you can't see the prey,
so you would walk through woodland and you would encounter the prey
and you'd have to respond fast and with power.
Putting all that together,
I hypothesise that maybe they were sprinters.
So, with some scientists, we're actually looking at
the Neanderthal genome to see if this hypothesis has any validity.
Good at sprinting, then? Good at sprinting short distance? Sure.
They would be powerful and fast, but there's a trade-off, right?
Being really good at that means that you're less good at endurance.
Usain Bolt, you know, can't run a marathon.
Apparently he's never run more than a mile in his life.
Some scientists now believe that Neanderthals would have been faster
than today's best human sprinters over short distances,
but they would soon run out of steam
and would have been left far behind by modern long-distance runners.
To demonstrate how evolution had turned them into sprinters,
not endurance runners, Dan has designed a really cool experiment.
Today's subject is Nick, one of Dan's research students
and also an accomplished long-distance runner.
Those dots are spheres
that are covered with an infrared reflective tape. OK.
And you see the cameras around the room? They emit an infrared light,
and then the light bounces off the sphere back to the camera
and the camera has sensors...
We're starting to get used to this because of Andy Serkis.
Correct. Same technology.
The cameras all know each other's position in three-dimensional space
and so as he runs, we know basically how his body is moving
and then this treadmill collects forces.
So this is actually a giant three-dimensional scale
with a treadmill that runs on top of it.
So, as he runs, the forces that his body puts on the treadmill,
we can measure.
So what happens if we turn Nick into a bit more of a Neanderthal?
We'll find out.
So, we use scientists' favourite material, which is duct tape.
We put some metal weights on a mask that's meant for respirometry
and we just duct taped it all.
And what that mask is going to do is it's going to move
the centre of mass of his head forward
and that is going to essentially simulate
what it would be like to have a head like a Neanderthal.
How does that feel? OK?
I think it's good. Cool. Nick, you look like a total Neanderthal.
With the rig set up, we can now see how becoming
a little bit Neanderthal affects Nick's performance.
Stopping in three, two, one.
Now.
So we recorded the muscle activity
in his neck muscle as well as his biceps
and this is what it looks like for normal Nick,
and then when we Neanderthalised him...
..it looks like the biceps and the cleidocranial trapezius
are both working harder.
That's because of the added mass that pulled the head out of balance.
What does this actually mean? So what it means is that, you know,
when Nick is running as a Neanderthal, right,
it's a much greater challenge for him to keep his head still.
Because his head is less balanced and more massive,
and so every time he hits the ground,
his head is pitching forward at a more rapid rate.
So if you're a Neanderthal and you're running,
you'd have to use a lot more
muscle force to try to control the pitching of the head.
And we have lots of evidence in the Neanderthal body,
literally from their heads to their toes,
that they wouldn't have been good at endurance.
Now we know that they were ambush hunters,
the next stage is to find out
how they would have brought down their prey.
So I went to meet Libby Cowgill in Washington, DC.
One of the things that we can study
is how much bone there is in the dominant arm.
So we can actually look at a fossil and say,
"Oh, this dude was totally right-handed,"
because we can see that more bone
is deposited on one side versus the other.
Can we see this asymmetry in this Neanderthal?
I can.
But it's pretty low-level, right?
What are you looking at?
I know. Because I can't see anything.
But if you look, the right arm at mid shaft
is ever so slightly bigger.
So you're saying that the humerus... Mm-hm.
..on the mid shaft... Yep. ..is slightly larger on the right side
than on the left side? That is 100% correct.
They were doing something during life
where their body laid down more bone on the right side
in response to a particular activity,
just like you'd lay down more muscle.
All the Neanderthals that have been found to date
have much thicker and stronger right arms
and Libby thinks she knows what they were using them for.
We do find these spears.
Big, heavy, wooden spears.
And they've actually been reconstructed as thrusting spears.
So you grab the thing and you power it with that back arm
and bring down large game with you and your buddies.
Adding this knowledge to the rest of the reconstruction work,
it becomes clear that Neanderthals
would have been formidable opponents.
You would not want to meet a Neanderthal in a dark alley.
He'd take you in a heartbeat.
The body size reconstructions for these guys
that you sometimes see thrown around -
5'6, but 5'6 and, like...
170, 175 of lean muscle.
Definitely not someone I would want to go toe-to-toe with.
Back in the studio, all our experts agree
that the Neanderthals needed their great strength
for their unusual style of hunting to succeed.
There was a great study where they looked at the pattern of injuries
in Neanderthals
and they compared them to data from the occupational safety
and the one occupation that best matched were rodeo riders,
who commonly are thrown from large animals
and land on their head and neck.
We have a lot of fractures, smashing of hands and feet.
And this is sort of reminiscent of fighting animals
in very close contact, somehow,
which matches this idea of going very close to the game
to thrust a big animal
and with the risk that the bison step on your feet, you know.
To avoid being trampled,
Neanderthals would have to subdue their prey quickly,
so they would have needed enormous power behind their spear thrusts,
which is where those strong right arms come in.
These guys had really, really strong chest muscles
for driving the arm forward.
Really large flexors of the forearm.
So just a lot of power in being able to drive the spear forward,
so I would imagine, even without a spear,
there's a lot of power in the upper body for doing that sort of thing.
So it would be the same as a punch, like a boxer would use, like a jab.
That cut - so the power comes from down there.
When we wonder what might have happened
when they first met modern humans, it's worth bearing in mind
that Neanderthals would have been very handy in a fight.
Between a Neanderthal and a modern human?
Well, you know, fighting is about power.
It's not about endurance for the most part, so...
Neanderthals look very stocky, very well-built.
They probably had a lot of power and strength
and that would be a benefit, at least in a hand-to-hand combat,
so I guess I would probably bet on the Neanderthal.
So far, we've built a body for Ned,
a skeleton clothed in powerful muscles.
But we need to add one final touch -
his skin.
Fossils can't tell us what colour it was,
so we put in a call to renowned skin expert
Professor Nina Jablonski.
Skin pigmentation,
that's the interface between the body and the environment.
And so, with Neanderthals being primarily
but not exclusively Circum-Mediterranean,
they weren't darkly pigmented people,
they were people who had moderately pigmented skin
that was capable of tanning.
This particular variant might also have conferred
reddish or lighter hair,
at least on some individuals.
But that's a bit more of a stretch.
Now we're getting to the stage where we can put everything together
and start to visualise Neanderthals in their natural environment.
We know what the Neanderthals look like,
how they moved, and enough about their behaviour
to reconstruct a hunt through the frozen forests of Europe.
They would have started by slowly stalking their prey...
GRUNTING
..huge Ice Age animals like woolly mammoths.
Then, when they were close enough, they could attack.
LOUD GRUNTS
And finally, they could feast.
If they were like some modern hunter gatherer societies,
they would have eaten more than just the meat.
Vegetables would have been in short supply
but they could access a rich source of vitamins and nutrients
by eating the half-digested vegetation
from the intestines of their prey.
So far, we've developed a detailed picture
of the physical side of Neanderthals.
But to recreate Ned completely, to reveal the inner person,
we also need to understand what was going on inside his head.
To discover what we know about the Neanderthal brain,
I went to visit the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig.
Philipp Gunz specialises in the 3-D imaging of Neanderthal skulls
to determine the size and characteristics
of the Neanderthal brain.
They call this the black room.
What we can do on the computer is fill what is now air,
what used to be the brain,
and create this virtual imprint of the brain.
Effectively, this red here, this is the fill,
so this is the imprint.
Yes. So that's the virtual imprint of the brain case.
What we consistently find is that Neanderthals
had very similar brain sizes to what modern humans have.
On average, they were even bigger than people living today,
but they had very different shapes. So if we put these side by side...
So if you compare them in profile, it's very easy to see
that modern humans have this round head
and Neanderthals has these elongated brain cases.
That, of course, corresponds to the shape of the brain.
Is there a way of getting this in our hands?
Yeah. So what we can do is create a 3-D print out
and then you can have it in your own hands
and touch it and feel the ridges and bumps.
3-D printing is a prime example of how modern technology can help us
understand the distant past.
It now gives us the ability to grow a model of a Neanderthal brain
right in front of our eyes.
It's going to work for 25 hours
and we'll have the whole thing in three dimensions.
So you have the outline of the brain already.
It's magic, no?
We love this little robot.
And it is tireless.
24 hours later,
and the cast of the Neanderthal brain is nearly ready.
After a whole day...
..look at that.
It's... It's... It's golden.
It looks like something you could eat, almost.
So it's like taking the pastry out of an oven.
Voila.
It's taken a whole day to get this far,
but this big yellow blancmange
still looks nothing like a Neanderthal brain.
For the final stage, Jean-Jacques has to get his hands dirty.
Using a water jet to remove the excess casing
reveals the detailed structure of the Neanderthal brain within.
And although it looks a lot like a modern human brain,
it's also very different.
Voila.
A fresh and clean Neanderthal brain.
This is incredible.
So, Jean-Jacques, you've brought your cake to London.
I brought you a Neanderthal brain.
And there are morphological differences
that we can see between this mould of the inner cavity of a skull
in a modern human and a Neanderthal
and what we think is that it could be this part of the brain,
the cerebellum,
that might be much bigger in modern humans than in Neanderthals.
The cerebellum is a very important part of the brain
with a lot of neurons and we know that it's involved in the learning,
in the learning of especially repetitive actions.
The problem is, of course, so much of it is about interconnections.
We don't have measures of how dense the neurons are,
although maybe the DNA's beginning to tell us
there could be differences between us and Neanderthals.
We're only beginning to get a look at that from the genetics.
We now know that Neanderthals had large, complex brains,
but that doesn't, in itself, answer the most important question.
Just how intelligent were they?
To be a hunter gatherer requires enormous cognition
and Neanderthals were foraging and hunting
in really challenging environments.
That requires intelligence and skill and communication and cooperation.
They couldn't have survived without all those factors.
Yeah, but the archaeological evidence tells us that
it's only with modern humans and rather recent modern humans
that we see the ability to go beyond reality
and to speak about things that
does not exist or will exist or may exist.
Let me respectfully disagree.
Many hunters have to predict where
the animals are going to be in the first place.
They have to know something about the future, they have to...
It's science. There're actually forming hypotheses and testing them
and I'll make a bet that Neanderthals,
skilled hunters that they were,
were engaging in a kind of natural science, and
that, to me, suggests a kind of abstract thought.
And hunting and gathering is a system - it's a way of life.
It also involves tools. You can't survive as a hunter gatherer,
a human hunter gatherer, without making and using tools.
But it also requires cooperation.
We have plenty of evidence that Neanderthals weren't stupid.
They made their own tools
and the technology they used was remarkably sophisticated.
The flint points of their spears were sometimes stuck onto
the wooden shafts with powerful glues that we find difficult,
if not impossible, to replicate today.
We know that some of these glues made of a mix of resin
had to be prepared at a given temperature
to be efficient glues,
so it means these guys had the knowledge of cooking it
at the given temperature
and then fixing the stone tool into its handle.
So, from a technological point of view,
there is no discussion that Neanderthals were quite capable.
How clever the Neanderthals were is clearly a contentious issue.
But recently, archaeological evidence has come to light
that suggests they were capable of the very human traits
of abstract thought and expression.
And, rather brilliantly, some of the best of that evidence
is to be found inside the Rock of Gibraltar.
40,000 years ago, these dramatic caves cut into the rock
were home to a community of Neanderthals.
We've found the remains of some of the occupants,
but we've also found intriguing clues about their lives.
We've got a gate here for protection of the site.
Paleoanthropologists Clive and Geraldine Finlayson
are the custodians of the remarkable archaeological sites
found deep within the caves.
But this, if you like, is the inner sanctum of the cave.
This is super-sensitive
because of all the discoveries that we've made in here.
We had been working in this area
and one of our colleagues said to us...
I think he came to Clive and he said, "Have a look at this."
We've had to cover it up to protect it,
but we did take a lot of photographs and we've got a 3-D print out
that we can show you. That would be great.
So, let's just dangle it...
They looked pretty nondescript straight lines
except realising that we were in a Neanderthal level
and the implication was huge. I mean, it's a hashtag.
More or less what everybody has called it, so why not?
Neanderthal social media.
Somebody has deliberately set down a thought
that had been conceptualised in their minds
and put it down on the rock and that is a first.
I've had a lot of correspondence, a lot of suggestions.
Some very way out. Like what?
Somebody suggested it might be a way of mathematics -
doing multiplications. Maybe it's constellations.
It's a place where the cave criss-crosses.
Is it a map of the cave?
Maybe it's a mark of a clan. Some people have suggested that as well.
You had a very good suggestion.
Well, I had one suggestion from one that impressed me.
And that person wrote to me and said,
"Have you realised that that mark, we all have?"
It's intriguing to imagine that this hashtag
could represent the lifelines on a Neanderthal's palm
and that this could be amongst the world's oldest art.
Elsewhere in the caves, Clive believes he's found evidence
of Neanderthals practising another modern human trait.
Dressing up.
He has found large numbers of wing bones
from the black vultures which migrate past Gibraltar each year.
These bones would have had little nutritional value,
so they weren't collecting them to eat,
but they would have borne spectacular feathers,
and Clive believes they were being used for personal adornment.
They seem to like black feathers.
Now, I don't really know what that means
but it does tell me that they had these mental capacities
to somehow go beyond and abstract from that environment.
You see that in this possible colour choice for feathers.
Clive, is that ash on them?
Yes.
One suggestion is that they may have used ash oak to put on their body,
not just for decoration, maybe for hygienic purposes as well.
It's a possibility.
I mean, we're working here with a little bit of conjecture.
They could have had really elaborate body paint and that might have been
an expression for them. They could have been stunning, striking, scary.
And it would never show in the fossil record.
It would never show in the fossil record.
This is all valuable information
that can tell us how we should dress our Neanderthal models.
The evidence from Gibraltar suggests that, just like us,
the Neanderthals wore jewellery and make up,
not just for warmth or utility, but to look good.
I'm beginning to understand that in many ways
these ancient Neanderthals were a lot like me.
But the big question is if we ever came face-to-face,
would we have been able to communicate?
Did Neanderthals share the ultimate form of modern human expression -
language?
It's not easy to work out if the Neanderthals could speak,
but the first place to start, as always, is with the fossils.
So I went back to my own institution,
University College London,
to meet my colleague Dr Sandra Martelli.
Sandra has been working with the tiny bone
that enables human speech
by regulating how air travels through our voice box -
the hyoid.
There it is.
You can see it looks like a horseshoe
and it sits here on your neck like that.
So the view we actually have of this here
is if I hold that up there,
it's like that.
To discover if Neanderthals were capable of speech,
we need to compare our hyoid bone to theirs.
But even that has proved surprisingly difficult.
The hyoid is one of only two bones in our body
that isn't attached to any other part of the skeleton,
so we can't be certain exactly where it was positioned
or what it did in Neanderthals.
The hyoid bone is incredibly delicate.
As you can see, this one's broken.
And I think that's part of the problem with trying to find
hyoid bones of Neanderthals.
There's actually only one hyoid bone in existence
and that's at Kebara, which is in Israel.
I do actually have the Kebara hyoid here.
We would have to know where that bone sat,
so we cannot know it for sure,
but we can actually make an educated guess
in putting that hyoid where we think it should be
so it looks like a modern human,
so that the sounds actually can alter fast.
Because we are very good at saying things like,
"Oh, eh, ee, oh, oo," very quickly.
All languages, modern languages, have "ee" and "oo" in them.
So the trick is to find out if the Neanderthals
could do those two sounds. The "ee" and the "oo."
Sandra has been using a computer model of the Neanderthal vocal tract
to see if they could have produced those sounds.
You can actually tell the computer that here is your vocal tract
and then the computer can compute
what air streaming through here would sounds like.
And they have actually produced some sound files for that.
All right, so, these things have been dead for 37,000 years
and we're about to hear what they might have sounded like.
I'm giving you first the sounds that the model produces
when we configure it to do a human.
COMPUTERISED HUMAN VOICE: Ahh, eee, ooo.
This is how the computer sounds when it says, "Ahh, eee, ooo."
It's not very melodious, but... Not melodious at all.
Now, this is actually what
the model does when we tell it it's a Neanderthal now.
GRUFF COMPUTERISED VOICE: Uhr, eee, ooo.
Can you play that again?
Uhr, eee, ooo.
So the Neanderthals have done it. They're speaking.
The "eee" and "ooo" were really clear.
I'm sure you heard that. I will happily play it again.
Uhr, eee, ooo.
The "uhr", the "ahh" - that sounds very different.
I love how all of us right now
are trying to do these sounds in our heads.
It's like prehistoric lip-synch battle or something terrible.
So they're quite similar. So here is your human.
Neanderthal.
Human again.
Neanderthal.
So their anatomy suggests they could make the right sounds.
But did they have the mental capacity for language?
Well, possibly.
One thing that points to that is the recent discovery
of the Neanderthal version of a gene called FOXP2.
The exact same version of that gene is found in modern humans
where it is required for language development.
A lot of people think that Neanderthals just grunted.
Could we say now that the consensus is that they probably could talk?
There's a consensus that the brain plays a huge part, of course,
and Neanderthals had a big brain that could probably
allow for communication at high level,
but in terms of vocalisation, I think there are big questions there.
It's also really important to make a distinction between language,
you know, what people are saying and the content of what they're saying,
and speech, which is the acoustic properties of vocalisation.
All apes can vocalise, but the question is
how complex this vocalisation is, how articulate they are.
The debate remains open over how sophisticated
Neanderthal language was.
I mean, it might have been simpler than our own,
but looking at the evidence, it's really hard to argue
that Neanderthals weren't talking and communicating with each other
and possibly us.
We've now built a detailed image of Ned, our Neanderthal.
By gathering the most up-to-date scientific evidence,
we know what his face looked like,
how he moved and used his immense strength.
We're even beginning to get a picture of the resourceful,
thoughtful mind within.
But now the time has come to get really close up,
to look our distant ancestor in the eye.
It's finally time to bring Ned to life.
With a bit of computer wizardry, we can insert him back into his world.
But then it's down to Andy to give Ned his personality.
Even if he could talk, we don't know what his language
would have sounded like, so we're not going to make him speak.
Instead, the cameras on this motion-capture rig
will record every twitch and detail of Andy's facial expressions.
Expressions that are then mapped onto Ned
as he wakes from his 60,000-year sleep.
And here he is.
Ned, the Neanderthal.
With the power of motion-capture,
we've brought back to life the most complete
and, we think, accurate
computer reconstruction of a Neanderthal ever created,
and Andy has given him a soul.
For most of this programme,
we've been thinking about the period tens of thousands of years ago
when modern humans first ventured into the Neanderthals' world.
But to see how similar we are,
perhaps it would be better for the Neanderthal to enter our world.
'The next stop will be Tottenham Court Road.
'Change here for the Northern Line.'
A paleoanthropologist said that if you've got a Neanderthal,
you put him in a suit and put him on the New York subway,
nobody would notice, to which another paleoanthropologist said,
"Yeah, but, mate, that says
"more about New York than it does about Neanderthals."
Well, here we are in London in the Underground,
and he fits in pretty well here too.
Now, none of us in the carriage are getting the full effect.
This is what we're seeing.
He's just a man in strange make up.
It's only when we add the full CGI face replacement
that you can see how well he blends in with us modern humans.
He's shorter and broader, facially a bit unusual,
but he's definitely not the strangest thing
I've ever seen on the Tube.
In the next programme, we'll be revealing
some of the surprising reasons that we are so similar
to the Neanderthals.
We could have up to 70%
of the Neanderthal genome
spread out all over people all over the world.
We'll be looking at the genetic legacy
the Neanderthals have left us.
There's evidence that diabetic conditions,
the storage of fats and starches,
these may be correlated with the presence of Neanderthal DNA,
so, in the future, I think this will be important for therapy.
And we'll be asking what happened to the Neanderthals.
As we've seen, they were stronger, faster,
smarter and much better looking than we thought.
So what happened?
What made the difference all those tens of thousands of years ago
when modern humans entered their territory?
How on earth did the Neanderthals end up not winning?
And why is it that we're here today
and they are not?