What happened to all the other humans?

Unlike other animals, us humans are all alone, aren't we? There's just one species of us. But it wasn't always that way. 50,000 years ago, there were multiple species of human alive across the globe.

Our ancestors, Homo sapiens, were in Africa and starting to spread out across the world. Neandertols roamed Eurasia from Britain to Siberia and as far south as the Middle East. In Asia, there were multiple distinct human groups. the Denisven in mainland Asia, uh Homopurizensis in Flores, and we have several other fossils that are uh very debated at the minute.

It's not entirely clear where they fit on our evolutionary tree, and they could also be lost lineages of humanity. By 30,000 years ago, though, it seems like they were all gone and we were the only ones left. To be totally upfront, we don't know why. But today, we're going to discuss some ideas around it.

From the dramatic to the controversial, don't think of any of these hypotheses as as definitively the truth. Think of them instead as as clues. Clues to the oldest cold case in humanity, the disappearance of all the other human species. [Music] These bones in this mud here belonged to a Neanderal who lived in Grot Mandrin in the south of France.

The excavators nicknamed him Thorin after the dwarf in in The Hobbit. Great name. Love that name. All archaeologists, I'm sure, love Tolken.

Gandalf. He was one of the last Neandertols to ever live, as far as we're aware. Living sometime between 42 and 50,000 years ago. A study into his DNA was released last September and it sort of gives us a first piece perhaps of this extinction puzzle.

According to the study, the population he was a part of had been isolated from other Neanderal communities for a staggering 50,000 years. 50,000 years. Can you believe it? Now, that's rather a surprising result because why would they be so isolated in an environment that was almost the core region of the Neanderals, sort of Western Europe?

That seems to be a really core region for them. Why would they be isolated for so long? We're not sure. So, those results are there's a lot of thinking going on about them.

But what is definitely fair to say is that Thorin was pretty inbred as a result. More inbred than than modern humans are. ...