Neanderthals in Europe, Late Neanderthalls in the Near East

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Neanderthals are an incredibly impressive group of humans that lived in western eurasia. Neanderthals appear clearly in the skeletal record few hundred thousand years ago. And late neanderthals persist in europe until about forty thousand years ago, at which point they seem to disappear from the skeletal record as a didistinct group of humans. They can clearly inter bred, cause that's what they did, right? So how reason is this understanding, and in what exactly did we learn?

Human beings like to divide themselves into groups, and then cooperate, socialize, and reproduce with members of their own group. But they’re not very absolutist about it; groups tend to gradually (or suddenly) intermingle, as people explore, intermarry, or conquer each other. David Reich has pioneered the use of genetic data in uncovering the history of ancient humanity: what groups existed where and when, and how they interacted. The result is a picture of churning populations in constant flux, including “ghost populations” that no longer exist today.

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David Reich received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is currently a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. Among his awards are the Dan David Prize, the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, the Wiley Prize, the Darwin-Wallace Medal, and the Massry Prize. He is the author of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.

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