Joe Rogan & Steve Rinella on Neanderthals

I was wishing to have a little more of that floating around in me. It's a bizarre heritage, you know, the idea that there was a different type of human that bred with Homo sapiens and that there's like little bits and pieces of it floating around in people. Yeah, and people discuss them. People discuss, I was having an argument the other day where they say neanderthal or neanderthal and everyone goes up saying neanderthal and it's one of those things you're supposed to switch once you realize how you're supposed to do it. Right. Neanderthal, but I just can't get comfortable with it. I go back and forth. There's a lot of words like that where I know you're supposed to do it, but I can't get comfortable with it because I feel like it makes you sound pretentious. It does. It's like rolling your R's in certain Spanish words. But we have this idea that neanderthals as unsuccessful, right? Right. There are these brutish thugs that died out, but they had a 600,000 year run in Europe alone. 600,000 years. Overrun than Homo sapiens have actually existed. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know that we're going to hit, like, I don't know that we're going to match up and have that run. Well, we'll probably have a 23andMe for whatever the fuck is after us. And look, somebody back then fucked a human. Like oh, one of those crazy war monger fucking rapist thieving humans. That died out. That turns out they didn't totally die out. Someone with emotions and lies and someone of a superior race infiltrated the humans and banged one of them. Yeah, it's funny to look at that understanding of those people and then to have this, to picture in your minds, I even though you can't picture it. Like what it was like when they were hooking up. So when, you know, like anatomically and kind of behaviorally modern humans were hooking up with Neanderthals, how was it perceived by their peers? I bet the people that we think of as people back then, like, you know who George the Animal Steel is? No. George the Animal Steel is a very famous pro wrestler from back in the day. And I thought you were going to say it was a paleontologist or anthropologist. No. He's a wrestler. He's a wrestler, pro wrestler, very famous guy who could be a fucking caveman, like legitimately could be a caveman. See if you got a good image of him. Now this is what I think when I think of people. Give me a full body one. There you go. When I think of people that are homo sapiens from, you know, 200,000 years ago, I think of George the Animal Steel. I think they were something like that. So the idea of George fucking a Neanderthal chick, not that far off. I think our idea is like that, like Dan Rather would be out there banging some monkey lady. I just don't think, I don't think that's the case. Like, look at George's body. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. He's got the hairiest shoulders I've ever seen in a man. Is he still alive? I do not know. I don't believe he is. I hope he's not listening right now. I don't believe he is. He's a legend. Legend in the world of the pro wrestling. So it's going to take more than this to hurt his feelings. That guy doesn't give a fuck. He's a legend. But when I was a kid in high school, he's old as fuck. Yeah. Well, those guys, they all, that's a hard way to make a living, man. Oh, he died at age 79. He had a good run. Yeah. That's a good run for those guys. That's a fucking hard way to make a living. Have we ever talked about the idea of Neanderthals as like having a confrontational hunting style? No, I don't think we have. Because when anthropologists look at the skeletal remains of Neanderthals, they see this sort of suite of this pattern of injuries on them. And a researcher was looking at the types of fractures that they have on their bones and where the fractures occurred and the breaks and like cracks in their skulls. He was looking at all this and wound up working with a doctor who had a lot of exposure to rodeo riders, bull riders. And the doctor was observing the way in which that suite of injuries was very familiar to him from rodeo riders, the types of breaks and the location of breaks. And this guy has this idea that they had a very confrontational hunting style, that they were like mixing it up with big animals. And another thing they found is that when you're looking at skeletal remains from early people, you still see that separation in the sexes, right? The males would suffer injuries with a greater prevalence than females. But with the Neanderthals, it seems like they didn't have the sort of like duplicity of roles. And the females have the same prevalence of these types of injuries. And so maybe they didn't share that division of labor. Were the females as large as the males? Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. So we know that they had stone tools, right? The crude stone tools. But we don't know whether or not they had anything that could launch them. Do we know if they had spears? I don't believe that they found they had adelattles. And I don't know if they were hafting materials, but they were doing art. And I think there's a little bit of a debate about whether they're doing representational art, but they were doing art. They were probably making jewelry. And these are all things that as we kind of like wake up to what these people were really like, and it paints like a more complicated picture. There's even this theory, and I don't know if this held any water or how long it was fashionable for, but you had this really long history of, it was extremely long history of hundreds of thousands of years in Neanderthal occupation in Europe. And then it seemed to be that I remember someone putting forth this idea that it seemed to be that there was this flourishing of advancement that was contemporaneous with the arrival of our own ancestors in Europe, as though they were being exposed to or seeing art and seeing jewelry and mimicking this from these new invaders that were coming in. But I don't know where that idea sits right now. I don't know if it's been dispelled because of other discoveries. But remember, I think that was an interesting idea that they would, and it kind of paints this really sad picture, right? That they would be sort of in the autumn of their existence, and here's these adorned people showing up with these amazing toolkits and all these abilities and kind of struggling to sort of catch up. It'd be like the country bumpkin going to the big city. Yeah. Well, there was also this idea, I think up until very recently, that Neanderthals were not as violent as humans, as Homo sapiens. But now there was an article that was published just a couple of days ago that new evidence shows that Neanderthals like inter Neanderthal violence between each other was just as bad as Homo sapiens. Yeah. And find that in evidence of cannibalism. Oh yeah, there was a lot of that right scraping of inside the skulls indicative of tools. Oh, ad blocker got busted. They get us every time with the fucking ad blocker. Yeah. What does it say? Humans are just as violent as Neanderthals. Are you familiar with the writer John Muallum? No. You'd like his stuff. Yeah. He wrote a really beautiful piece about Neanderthals not long ago. Okay, I fucked it up. What they're saying is that modern humans were just as prone to violence as Neanderthals. I don't have a problem doing that. I think I'm conflating this with something else that I read about inter species violence, Neanderthal on Neanderthal violence. The other thing that's weird about them is they had bigger brains in us. They're bigger brains and they would be like five seven and weigh 200 pounds, just jacked, just a little gorilla thing. It'd be great to see it. There's a really dumb theory that was being bounced around a few years ago. It was really hilarious about how we wiped out. We assumed that Neanderthals, because you don't have any soft tissue samples, we assumed that Neanderthals looked similar to humans. But because of the very different shape of their skull, this guy had, instead of giving them European looking white skin, turned them into a gorilla, turned them into a giant muscle bound gorilla that preyed on people. This was like, I believe this guy actually was a professor and it seemed almost like a goof at first. Do you remember this, Jamie? We pulled this up a few times. Like killer Neanderthal theory, I think you call it, but he had drawn this thing black like a gorilla with giant muscles all over the place and these big crazy eyes and that painting Neanderthals as a predator of humans. That's why we wiped them out. My limitations as, see, I was going to say my limitations as an anthropologist, but I'm certainly not an anthropologist at all, I'm just a dude who's interested in it. But one of my limitations is I'll hear theories floated. And I don't follow them long enough to see which ones have any traction. I'll just read about them and I don't take it as gospel, but I'll read about it and I'll be like, that's interesting and it'll sort of like shape my understanding of it, but then I don't keep track of it. I try to really follow the story of the peopling of the Americas. So when it comes to the human history of the Western Hemisphere, I sort of follow and ideas will get floated and I'll track the idea to see where it lands in terms of scholarly consensus. But another stuff like with Neanderthals, I'm always a sucker for a Neanderthal story, but I don't track what ideas that float up are just very quickly denounced as being complete rubbish. Yeah, it's a weird one. You know, it takes time to follow this stuff. Go to that other picture. That's what it is. Them and us. Yeah. Look at some of his images. Look at that image that he has on the cover of the book. Like there was the idea. Yeah. There's some way better ones. There's some way better images where they drew of full body ones. They had, is it in the article? This was a link to the actual website from a different article. Just go to that and then go to images because there was some really bizarre fucking, yeah, there it is, upper left hand corner. This is what this guy. Yeah, whatever he's got going on, that thing is not making art. You don't think so? No, he's making meat. Come on. Yeah, it's pretty preposterous. But Neanderthals didn't have fangs like that either, did they? No. What is that? Is he morphing a Neanderthal into a gorilla? Is that what he's trying to do? Oh, that's a, I got you. Monkey, gorilla, Neanderthal. But yeah, but like how it's got it snarling with its fucking vegetable eaten teeth. Anyway, it's, it's, and then there's the, do we even know what those Denovians, just, how do you say that word, the one from Russia? Yeah. They don't have any idea what they looked like, right? No, I don't think so. Just like some pinky bones and shit. No, they have, that one's not, that one I don't know.