- 1 week ago
AI slop is littering your feed and spreading misinformation, so WIRED’s here to set the record straight. Join Anthropologist Agustín Fuentes as we fact check the internet, anthropology edition.
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00:00This is slop. This is not a 60,000-year-old human.
00:06Look at this guy. It's just a chimpanzee with sort of a nice hairdo.
00:12Why make up all this slop when you actually have good archaeology?
00:15I'm an anthropologist, and I study human evolution. Let's fact check some AI slop.
00:23Okay, let's watch this first video.
00:26What would happen if you were raised by Neanderthals?
00:28What would happen if you were raised by Neanderthals and you were a see-through glass skeleton?
00:32Let's find out.
00:33Age one, you survived the brutal winter.
00:36Their high-calorie diet of raw marrow and fat.
00:39A human at one years of age would have been cared for by Neanderthals, probably.
00:43But at one years of age, you're chomping down with fully adult teeth.
00:46Age five, you're already as strong as a modern-day adult.
00:50Well, that's just BS. Come on, people.
00:52You learn to make fire or you freeze.
00:54At five, you learn to make fire or you freeze.
00:57Did they throw the kid back out?
00:59Was he not just living with the whole group in the cave making fires?
01:02What happened here?
01:03Neanderthals don't use bows. They get close.
01:05No, bows are pretty recent. Probably 30, 40, 50,000 years old.
01:09And we don't have any evidence that Neanderthals use them.
01:12But Neanderthals did throw spears. That's for sure.
01:14You are a biological tank. Your bones are 30% thicker than a modern human's.
01:19To say that the Neanderthal is just much larger than humans, first of all, is wrong.
01:24Second of all, Neanderthals vary themselves as well.
01:26They were not biological tanks. They were people, a lot like us.
01:3140,000 years later, scientists find your frozen remains.
01:35Okay, let's talk about this for a minute.
01:37Are we going to find some ancestor perfectly frozen in ice?
01:40No, that's impossible, right? The individual had to die or be crushed or be stepped on
01:46or sort of be desiccated and sort of degrade.
01:49What we have found is dried skin, mummified individuals, and in bogs,
01:53sometimes the bodies and the skin and the hair are preserved.
01:56But those are a few thousand years old, maybe 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 in some cases,
02:00but no older than that.
02:01So we do find mummies. We do find remains.
02:03But a flash frozen individual, not going to happen.
02:06What we do find are animals up in the far north that have fallen into a mud pit or a
02:12quicksand
02:12or a bog, and they get frozen.
02:15Those desiccated animals are really fascinating, but they're not flash frozen organisms.
02:20Okay, next.
02:21The first humans were the-
02:23So let me just start right away.
02:24There's an orangutan face, there's a human face, there's a gorilla face,
02:28there's a chimpanzee face on a bunch of human bodies.
02:31They emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago
02:34and spread across-
02:36Okay, we're all sitting around a fire here.
02:38If you look at this guy, like right here in the middle,
02:41that's sort of a mashup of a human and an old chimpanzee face.
02:45Yeah, it never existed, right?
02:47This guy over here on the end, well, that's like a homo erectus,
02:51or maybe someone from North Africa today, you can't quite see.
02:53Here you got a guy from South Pacific, probably.
02:56And then in the back, looking really bored here,
02:58you got some dude who probably lived maybe 10 or 15,000 years ago in Northern Europe.
03:02Their ability to communicate by developing language
03:05allowed them to transmit their culture more effectively.
03:09So it turns out that whales, apes, wolves, crows,
03:13a whole bunch of different things communicate through things like language.
03:17That's not just us.
03:18The AI slop here is trying to make humans totally different from everything else.
03:23Cultural expressions such as art, music, and ritual.
03:27Okay, and this is my favorite face here.
03:29Let's take a closer look at this guy.
03:31That prognathic jaw, see right, like around the face where it's sticking out?
03:35Okay, that sticking out didn't happen with this size head and this size eyes
03:39and this structure of ears and forehead.
03:41So it turns out that nothing in the fossil record looks like this.
03:45It's been two and a half million years since we had anything like that.
03:48It's not just the face on this.
03:50It has all of this beads and some art stuff.
03:53This particular stuff that he's wearing, that's contemporary.
03:56That is directly lifted off of people living today.
04:00Okay, let's move on.
04:01Why did humans lose most of their hair?
04:04That's a really good question.
04:06At first, the answer seems obvious.
04:09Many important stages of human evolution happened in hot environments.
04:13Lots of things live in hot environments and have tons of hair.
04:17So, nope, that's not it.
04:19Researchers such as Peter Wheeler argued that reduced body hair,
04:22combined with sweating and upright walking, may have helped early humans release heat more efficiently.
04:28I mean, that's debated.
04:30There's tons of other animals that also release heat pretty damn efficiently with tons of hair.
04:34Let's think about cheetahs.
04:36Let's think about every other primate.
04:38Giraffes.
04:39All of those things do pretty well covered with hair out on the savanna.
04:43Compared to other primates, humans evolved exceptionally dense, eccrine sweat glands.
04:48So, it is true, we are a very sweaty species.
04:52That's a good point.
04:53Deficient cooling may have helped early humans remain active in heat for longer periods,
04:59during long-distance movement and endurance running.
05:02So, there are folks who really argue this, that this is a big part of our evolution,
05:06that it was endurance running so that we could hunt things and run after them
05:10until they got tired and we stabbed them to death and ate them.
05:12That's a possibility, but it's not definitive.
05:15A lot of things move long distances with hair on their bodies, like wildebeests.
05:20They migrate over hundreds of miles.
05:22I love this AI slop, particularly because it shows some dude,
05:27maybe a million years ago, running across the savanna by himself.
05:31There was tons of other animals.
05:33Saber-toothed cats, giant eagles, and huge hyenas all waiting to eat you.
05:38You know what the sure way to get dead is?
05:41Saber-toothed cats, run across the savanna by yourself when there are 16 giant feedlids out there.
05:46One thing humans did do is hang out together, and that was really important.
05:51This guy may be running from a pack of lions chasing him.
05:54Another hypothesis suggests that reduced body hair may also have lowered the burden of parasites.
06:06So reducing the parasites by getting rid of most of our body hair, bad move, didn't work.
06:12Plus, most of the parasites that bother primates in general, and humans in specific, burrow into our skin
06:17or live in our intestines.
06:19Losing hair might have cut down on the number of fleas, but the moment we put clothes on,
06:24we brought those fleas right back.
06:25As human groups became increasingly social, we have good evidence we got more parasites,
06:31more ticks, more lights, more fleas, because we were hanging out together,
06:34wearing fur, and sleeping and living together in the same places.
06:38And then comes the strangest part.
06:40Humans never became truly hairless.
06:42Um, yeah, we're mammals.
06:46Recent research led by Tina Lassisi suggests that scalps...
06:50The research they're about to reference is Tina Lassisi,
06:54a wonderful scholar who's done incredible work on hair evolution and things like that.
06:58They have her here as Tina Lassisi, uh, which is wrong.
07:03Tightly curled hair appears especially effective at reducing heat gain from direct sunlight.
07:08So, tightly curled hair, and this is work by Tina Lassisi and other colleagues,
07:13tightly curled hair, dark hair, certain different kinds of hair,
07:16actually protect the scalp better than sort of loose, uh, hair and especially lighter colored hair.
07:22Different parts of the body may have faced different evolutionary pressures,
07:26cooling, protection, scent, or social signaling.
07:30Looking at this, this is a modern cut, uh, both of hair and of clothes.
07:36This clothing cut doesn't make any sense.
07:38If you're gonna drape something up your body, it should cover your legs, right?
07:41It should go all the way down to protect you or to stay warm or what have you.
07:45When we look at the hair here, this hair looks combed,
07:48it looks well placed in that bun, and, uh, it was probably a lot messier than that.
07:53Okay, let's move on.
07:5430,000 BC, Altai region of Siberia, the last ice age.
07:59I am a complete stranger approaching their home.
08:02I'm just gonna walk in slowly, calmly, and hope for the best.
08:08So, this I really like because this is always under the assumption that, you know,
08:12there's this universal gestural language, which there sort of is in humans.
08:16But I like these, these guys here, and clearly they're in, you know, from what they look like,
08:22you know, Mongolia or Central Asia, something like that.
08:25And this weird white chick shows up in a very nicely knitted, uh, outfit.
08:29If I were these guys, I'd be a little bit more freaked out.
08:34So, this is a really cool reconstruction of houses or huts that we've found for 60, 70,
08:4180,000 years, maybe even older.
08:43And these are skins and tarps with mammoth tusks and sort of wood internal structuring.
08:48It's hard to build, and it's really cool.
08:50You know, when you put a fire in there, um, and you let the sort of smoke go out the
08:54middle of the hole,
08:55it's, it's, it's pretty warm.
08:58Let's take a close look at that pot there.
09:00Um, the pot has fur lining.
09:03So, the one thing that is accurate here, and I think is really important,
09:09is throughout history, up through today,
09:11when some stranger walks into a small village or something like that,
09:14most of the time people do help them.
09:16Eating mystery meat again.
09:17So, the whole idea of meat on a stick, I find very funny because, uh,
09:21yes, that's one way to cook a sort of meat.
09:23People, uh, frequently made these sort of lattice work things that sort of
09:27compress the meat and put it out and hung it over.
09:29Also, a very common way of cooking meat through today is to have stones right next to the fire
09:34that get really hot.
09:35And then rather than risking the meat falling off on a stick or something,
09:37put the meat on the stones and it cooks it really well.
09:40I think, I mean, this is for 10,000 years ago.
09:42This is okay.
09:43Let's take a look at this close.
09:44The stitching is way too refined,
09:46but something like this has been around for probably thousands of years.
09:51I mean, this could be a few hundred years ago in Mongolia.
09:54This could be, you know,
09:55eight to 10 to 12,000 years ago when there was a cooling off.
09:58This could be a hundred thousand years ago.
10:00But the problem is a hundred thousand years ago,
10:02we didn't have these kinds of containers.
10:04We didn't have this kind of stuff.
10:06This looks like a contemporary hunter-gatherer village.
10:09This person could have actually bought a plane ticket and gone to Mongolia
10:13and go hung out with some of the reindeer herders that live a part of the year out in the
10:17rough.
10:18All right, next.
10:23Oh no, this one has six million views.
10:29Homo habilis here is a dude, always, holding a arrowhead, a stone arrowhead mounted on a stick.
10:37We don't have any evidence of this kind of mounting till much later.
10:41That Homo habilis at 2.4 million years was not making that kind of refined arrowhead.
10:45He's from 2.4 million years ago, but that arrowhead and that mounting on a stick is not.
10:55And here we have the weightlifter class Homo erectus.
10:58This guy is really jacked and really squat.
11:01Homo erectus, a big difference that we start to see is they're taller and more slender in some cases,
11:05especially the ones that we find in East Africa and things like that.
11:12Here we are with Neanderthals at 400,000 with a nice beard.
11:15Now, we don't know if Neanderthals had beards or not, but we do know they probably didn't
11:20spend a lot of time grooming them.
11:21They didn't have the tools for that.
11:27Early Homo sapiens gathering water of the entire thing.
11:30This is probably the most accurate because it's a dude who looks like us with dark skin,
11:36which is what most of humanity has for most of our history.
11:44And the cognitive revolution at 70,000.
11:47There are a lot of people writing books about this.
11:48A lot of people who believe that it is totally incorrect.
11:52No, cave art is older than that.
11:54Figurines come around that time.
11:56Carving on bones 100,000 years earlier.
11:58Beads 128,000 years ago.
12:00The whole idea that out of nowhere, boom, 70,000 years ago we got smart and did cool stuff,
12:05like art, is simply not true.
12:08Our ancestors did amazing stuff for hundreds of thousands of years,
12:12piling on, changing things, being creative, being imaginative.
12:16And to take that away from them is to take away the story of who we are.
12:25Anyway, so we have a dude here 12,000 years ago, sort of furrowing things.
12:29Yes, about 14,000, 10,000, 12,000 years ago,
12:32many communities around the planet started domesticating plants, started doing agriculture.
12:36But many, many, many human communities did not and never do.
12:40So the whole idea that humans just automatically shifted over to agriculture, not true,
12:44and very AI sloppy, because it makes us think of people today,
12:47or in the recent past who weren't doing agriculture, as less than, as primitive, as different.
12:52And that's simply not true.
12:54Early humans followed what we now call the paleo diet.
12:58So this is not a paleo diet.
13:00These fruits we're seeing, these bananas, the lemon, the oranges, the avocado,
13:04these are domesticated fruits.
13:05It's really only the last few thousand years some of these fruits even existed.
13:09I once was around a wild banana, the old kind of bananas before they were modified by humans.
13:15It's a little banana filled with pebbles, basically, seeds.
13:19You can't eat any of it.
13:20Fruits and wild plants with zero processed grains or sugars.
13:24Yes, zero processed grains or sugars, because all of that is new.
13:28Grains didn't exist.
13:30Humans created grains.
13:31We got into relationship with the ancestors of wheat, the ancestors of rice,
13:35the ancestors of barley and sorghum, and we messed with them, and they messed with us,
13:40and we co-created cereals.
13:42Before 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, rice didn't exist.
13:45Squashes, about 12,000 years.
13:47I love a good red, delicious apple.
13:50That didn't exist a few hundred years ago.
13:52Our ancestors didn't eat processed food because there was no processed food.
13:56They did what's called foraging.
13:58They moved around their landscape, and they saw what's out there, and they got it.
14:02Grasses, fruits that grow on trees, bark, things like that that you can eat.
14:06And every now and then, you hunted.
14:08Usually small animals, or maybe fish, or maybe crawfish, or something like that.
14:12Humans didn't run around stabbing mammoths all the time.
14:15So, what is the paleo diet?
14:17It's everything that was out there.
14:19Wherever humans were, they ate what they could get.
14:22Next video.
14:24Around 60,000 years ago, in the heart of Africa.
14:27Look at these well-shaped blocks around this fire pit.
14:30That's a contemporary fire pit.
14:32The rains were becoming scarce, and conflicts with neighboring tribes were on the rise.
14:38What?
14:38We don't actually have any good evidence of large-scale conflict between groups.
14:43Until about 14,000 years ago, we have evidence of warfare-type stuff.
14:47But massive fights between tribes caused by resource stress or climate change,
14:52we don't have any evidence of that for a long time.
14:56They crossed the African plains.
14:58It says modern humans 60,000 years ago,
15:00and it's showing us different pictures of really, really different kinds of things, of organisms.
15:05For the last couple million years, particularly throughout Sub-Saharan Africa,
15:09there were different kinds of humans and human-related stuff.
15:12Australopithecus, Paranthropus, Homo erectus, Homo ergaster,
15:15different kinds of Homo sapiens living in and around the same place.
15:18Did they fight?
15:19Did they get long?
15:20Did they have sex?
15:21Probably all of the above.
15:23And traversed deserts until they...
15:25Okay, why are a bunch of wolves walking with these dudes?
15:29Now, what's really fascinating is over the last 30, 40,000 years,
15:32humans and wolves got together and hung out.
15:36That's how we got dogs, right?
15:37That's how we got this mutual relationship.
15:39That's how we got awesome pets and friends.
15:41When humans and dogs look at each other in the face and one of us yawns,
15:45the other one catches that yawn.
15:47Humans and dogs have an incredible, close relationship.
15:50But we weren't walking around together 60,000 years ago.
15:53They reached the shores of the Red Sea.
15:55There, they built simple boats from tree trunks and crossed to the other side,
15:59to the Arabian Peninsula.
16:00Okay, first of all, humans invented rafts or boats or things to get across open water
16:04well before 60,000 years ago.
16:06We have people in Australia and out on the islands throughout Indonesia.
16:10But what's really weird, this is like an ape guy.
16:12This looks like Planet of the Apes again.
16:14This is not a 60,000-year-old human.
16:16And, you know, let's go down here to this rope.
16:19Like, they probably had rope 60,000 years ago,
16:21but this is like industrial-grade ship rope.
16:24And look at these finely milled logs.
16:27This image is slop.
16:29We have all of this good archaeology out there.
16:31Why invent garbage when you actually have science?
16:34Okay, let's move on.
16:3640,000 years ago, homo sapiens spread across Europe,
16:40and another kind of human slowly vanished.
16:44Yeah, that's close.
16:46Most people think that most Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago.
16:50And it wasn't that there was massive climate change,
16:52or a bunch of humans came in and wiped them out.
16:54Because 24, 25, 26,000 years ago, there still were some groups of Neanderthals,
16:59maybe in Gibraltar and in a few other areas.
17:01So, 40,000, eh.
17:04What if Neanderthals never disappeared?
17:07I mean, if you look at this guy,
17:09that's sort of the classic Neanderthal that we thought all Neanderthals looked like 60,
17:1470 years ago when we just found out about them.
17:16It was with the big brows and sort of brutish looking.
17:19That's not the way a lot of them looked.
17:21It turns out that the first Neanderthal we found was an old man
17:24who sort of had a bunch of bone damage and stuff like that,
17:27but was sort of heavy and chunky.
17:29Then we found a lot of Neanderthals that weren't so chunky,
17:31that weren't so big, that were all over the place.
17:33What you really got to realize is if you put 10 Neanderthal skeletons and 10 human skeletons,
17:37they'd all look sort of different.
17:39There's a huge range of variation in us and a huge range of variation in Neanderthals
17:43that's not here.
17:44Their skulls were a little bit different, but not that different.
17:47Here, it's just too simple, and it makes it look like Neanderthals and humans were
17:51two totally different kinds of things.
17:53A sapiens clan found a Neanderthal family inside the cave they needed.
17:59Both groups were freezing.
18:00Did they hang out in a cave together?
18:02At least a few times, because many of us have Neanderthal DNA,
18:06and it's not just from one chance meeting.
18:09This happened again and again, probably over tens of thousands of years,
18:12where Neanderthals and humans got together, lived together, or at least hung out and had sex.
18:16Next.
18:18Oh, by the way, this video got 3 million views.
18:23So this is Purgatorius and Teohardina.
18:26These are supposed to be early primates deep in our ancestry,
18:31except one looked very much like an animal living today.
18:35And this one we have right here that they call Teohardina,
18:37that's supposed to have lived like 50 million years ago.
18:39This is a squirrel monkey from today.
18:41Yes, this species lived 50 million years ago,
18:43but it looked nothing like a squirrel monkey from today.
18:47And then we have Eosemius, which is one of my favorite fossil primates.
18:5145 million years old.
18:52We found these really cool teeth and some of these bones,
18:54and then they recreated to look basically like a rhesus macaque monkey living today.
18:59Come on, we have the bones, we have the teeth, we can do better.
19:05And Proconsul, which I really like.
19:07This is one of the earliest apes.
19:08This is probably a deep, deep, deep ancestor of humans itself.
19:12But this is a chimpanzee.
19:14That's not Proconsul.
19:16And Cilanthropus, one of the first hominins.
19:19And that's just an old chimpanzee, not even original.
19:22And here we have Auroran touganensis,
19:25maybe one of the first bipedal hominin-like things deep in our ancestry.
19:29And again, it's just a chimpanzee standing up on his hind limbs with sort of a nice hairdo.
19:39Now here's Ardipithecus.
19:41We've got some really fascinating skeletal material, fossils of Ardipithecus.
19:45And Ardipithecus, as far as we can tell, was not a blonde chimpanzee wandering around.
19:51Australopithecus afarensis.
19:52So what's cool about this video is it has sort of the dates right and the names right for sure,
19:58but the representation, the images, I mean, it is slop.
20:02This is my favorite one, because here we have the blonde-furred Australopithecus afarensis.
20:06This is the famous Lucy, right, that they're sort of representing here.
20:09This is the closest this video comes to something possibly as to what Lucy could have looked like.
20:16And now Homo habilis.
20:18There's a lot of problems here.
20:19It does show something absolutely important to Homo habilis and all humans.
20:23Stone tools.
20:24Homo habilis did make stuff just like this.
20:27This is a fairly old stone tool.
20:30Two million years old or so, something like that, maybe.
20:32They were a rock, right?
20:34Just a rock.
20:34Inside that rock are these edges and these cool shapes.
20:37And what's really amazing is that our ancestors saw this rock, looked at it,
20:43and recognized that inside was something else, a tool.
20:47But what this gets totally wrong is that stone tools show up about a million and a half years
20:52before Homo habilis does.
20:54And now, of course, Homo erectus.
20:56For some reason, the moment we become human, we start wearing, like,
21:00underwear or something like that that covers us up.
21:02That's just very weird.
21:03They still have him with a bunch of hair and a really big head for his body.
21:06Here's what Homo erectus might have really looked like.
21:10Ah, Homo heidelbergensis.
21:12Sort of archaic Homo sapiens.
21:14Maybe 400,000 years ago, 500,000 years ago.
21:17This is probably what Homo heidelbergensis really looked like.
21:23And early Homo sapiens.
21:24Now we have a very well-groomed beard on this guy who's carrying a nicer spear.
21:29But this is a big problem with AI slob.
21:32Reconstructions of early humans give them light skin and lightish hair.
21:36Most of humanity still has neither of those things.
21:39And in the past, light skin and light hair were extremely rare
21:42and don't start really showing up to the last few hundred thousand years.
21:49And modern Homo sapiens.
21:51Mr. Beast is the example of contemporary Homo sapiens.
21:54I mean, look at this guy.
21:55This is one of the rarest versions of humanity on the planet.
22:00Almost none of the eight billion of us, right,
22:02are sort of blonde with short hair and a little beard and a dude.
22:06The average human being today, the average modern human,
22:08is like a 24-year-old Chinese woman.
22:12Neanderthals didn't pick off prey from a safe distance with bows.
22:15They got in close, terrifyingly close.
22:19So let me show you the problem with AI reconstructing a hunt.
22:24It's true that Neanderthals and other groups of humans hunted large animals.
22:29Neanderthals seemed to do it a lot more maybe than others.
22:32And they did get up close and stab it with stuff.
22:34Loved to go in a time machine and check out a Neanderthal hunt.
22:37For the Neanderthal hunts, there were male and female Neanderthals there.
22:41Different ages. They were doing different kinds of things.
22:43They were active. They weren't just standing with a spear like,
22:45oh, let me stick the critter.
22:47They were actually planning things out, moving around.
22:49And those beasts, right, the big woolly rhino, the mammoths,
22:53other different kinds of things, cave bears, those things were fighting back.
22:57Driving heavy, thrusting spears into animals like horses.
23:01There's a lot. The way the spear goes in here, that's just bad AI.
23:04But what's really fascinating is this is a pretty contemporary-looking horse.
23:08Horses haven't changed that much, but over the last few hundred thousand years,
23:12they've changed enough.
23:13This horse probably would have been a little bit larger,
23:15and probably, if it was this northern living horse, been a heck of a lot furrier.
23:20Animal attacks.
23:21Okay, so we're looking at a giant sort of, you know, European lions.
23:26They sort of went extinct probably at the end of the Pleistocene, 10 to 20,000 years ago.
23:32There used to be lots of European lions. The last were hunted not that long ago.
23:35There were lions in Europe a few thousand years ago.
23:39Heavy, hard-working, cold-climate body that simply burned more energy than we do.
23:46Okay, so not all Neanderthals lived in frozen, cold environment.
23:50In fact, most Neanderthals did not.
23:52Many of them lived around the Mediterranean,
23:54where it wasn't cold at all, right?
23:55North Africa and places like that.
23:57So this whole idea that there's this big husky Neanderthal
24:00adapted to frozen, cold weather, really living this harsh life,
24:04that's just not true for Neanderthals across the board.
24:07What's going on here, and why I like this piece of the AI video,
24:10is that this is a bunch of individuals collaborating together
24:13to skin and deflesh a giant mammoth.
24:16And we know they did that, and we know they shared and worked together
24:19together to get done what had to get done.
24:22One estimate suggests they could haul 50 pounds of meat for nearly 30 miles.
24:27Let's stop this for a second.
24:29Why would a Neanderthal carry 50 pounds or 30 pounds of meat on his back by himself
24:35across long distances?
24:36AI slop takes away the community, the group, what was really going on,
24:41and paints these lone, hero, hardcore, athletic, macho Neanderthal guys.
24:47Neanderthals didn't live alone.
24:49They weren't only guys.
24:50And they didn't carry meat on their back for 50 miles.
24:54So now you might be wondering if you're one of the millions carrying Neanderthal DNA.
24:59So that's a misstatement.
25:01Pretty much all humans have Neanderthal DNA.
25:04Some have a lot, some have very little.
25:05Some have more Denisovan DNA.
25:07Some have very little.
25:08All of us have DNA from different ancestors across different times.
25:12Okay, so let's talk about this for a minute.
25:15So if this host, this narrator is AI created, let's unpack that for a moment.
25:20Why is this the guy talking about human evolution Neanderthals?
25:23Well, he's wearing an explorer hat, so he must be an explorer.
25:27He's an old white dude with a beard and seems rugged, right?
25:30Why did AI not put in one of the many, many, many, many women who are researchers who study Neanderthals?
25:37In fact, Rebecca Rag Sykes is one of the best scholars studying Neanderthals.
25:42Written a whole book on him.
25:43Why is she not in there?
25:44Who's studying the Neanderthals?
25:45Who's doing cool work?
25:47Yeah, some of the people studying them are white dudes who wear hats with white beards, but very few.
25:51There's one famous individual, an older male, lost the use of his right arm,
25:56was struck in the face hard enough to blind one eye and had his ear canals so damaged by repeated
26:02injury
26:03that he likely went deaf.
26:05The community kept him alive.
26:07And this is what's amazing.
26:08And this video gets is totally right.
26:10One of the most incredible things that the Neanderthals gave us is a bunch of data,
26:15a bunch of fossils and a bunch of bones that clearly demonstrate that Neanderthals helped each other out.
26:20They cared for one another.
26:21So many Neanderthals have broken bones, different kinds of damage,
26:25real things that could have killed them if members of their group hadn't been there for them,
26:30hadn't tended to them, hadn't given them sort of leaves to dull the pain,
26:34hadn't cleaned the wounds and bound them up to protect them from being infected.
26:38And we even have evidence of blind and deaf and really infirm folks without teeth
26:43who are being helped by their colleagues.
26:46This AI slop that's really messy at least is giving us something that's worth listening to.
26:52Well, that's all the slop for today.
26:54Thanks for watching.
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