@itsaihistory: 🦴  Neanderthals in Real Life | 50,000 years ago What you're seeing: A Neanderthal band in Ice Age France, about 50,000 years ago. Then their encounters with modern humans, and what DNA later revealed. Who were the Neanderthals? Another kind of human, Homo neanderthalensis. Shorter and stockier than us, with heavy brows and brains as large as ours. They hunted reindeer, bison and red deer, used stone-tipped spears and fire, and evidence suggests they sometimes cared for severely injured members and buried their dead. The clothing and foot wraps shown here are inferred. None survive. Where did they come from? Neanderthals evolved in Eurasia after their lineage separated from the ancestors of modern humans. DNA from 430,000-year-old fossils at Sima de los Huesos shows they were closer to Neanderthals than to Denisovans. When did they live? Neanderthals lived across Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. These scenes take place about 50,000 years ago, about 10,000 years before they disappeared. Did they meet modern humans? Yes. Homo sapiens were in the Middle East about 100,000 years ago. Evidence from Grotte Mandrin suggests a brief modern human presence there about 54,000 years ago, ahead of a lasting expansion into Europe about 45,000 years ago. They overlapped for thousands of years and interbred. When did they disappear? Neanderthal sites across Europe end about 41,000 to 39,000 years ago. No single cause is proven. They disappeared as a distinct human population, but part of their DNA survives. People with ancestry outside Africa typically carry about one to two percent Neanderthal DNA. Low levels also occur in African populations. Sources:Harari, Sapiens; Meyer et al., 2016; Green et al., 2010; Prüfer et al., 2017; Trinkaus & Villotte, 2017; Rendu et al., 2014; Higham et al., 2014; Hublin et al., 2020; Slimak et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2020. 🎥 All visuals are original AI-assisted recreations produced by @itsaihistory for educational and documentary purposes. © 2026 ItsAI LLC #itsaihistory #History #neanderthal #reels #Science

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Saturday 19 September 2026 16:33:26 GMT