What Did It Feel Like To Be An Early Human?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, I’m Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday.

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Today on the show, a new science doc on early human life leans into the Lord of the Rings -iness of it all.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Like, it was a magical, magical kind of– it almost sounds like I’m a child and making this stuff up. But I promise this is real science.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do TV science documentaries need a refresh? What if the goal wasn’t just teaching you something, but making you feel something? A new series on PBS called Human tries to do just that. It tells the complicated, dramatic tale of our ancient family tree. Who were the different species of humans that lived on this planet before us, and how did we become the only ones left standing?

The show is hosted by paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, who had a vision for how to tell this story so that today’s humans lean in. Ella, welcome to Science Friday.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Thank you for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. What did you want to do differently with this series? Were there stylistic tropes you were working to avoid?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So I have to say, I basically turned around very early on and had certain ideas about what I wanted to do, should we say. And I think it’s really funny because, obviously, I’m sitting there talking to incredibly seasoned filmmakers who made some of the biggest science shows out there, and there’s this– in my mind, I’m still a little girl with pigtails being like, I have ideas.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What were the ideas? What did you want to do?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So I basically said, look, we need to put the human back into human evolution. My argument for a long time has been that you guys let David Attenborough give more emotion to ungulates than you will let me give to my ancestors and our ancestors. And it doesn’t make sense because, by definition, to be human is to be emotional and to have a vast emotional range. And if we strip that when we tell our story, we’re doing ourselves a disservice.

Now, obviously, the very next question and the right next question is, OK, but it has to be based in facts, and you don’t what a Neanderthal was feeling at a particular moment. But we certain things about the way we behave, and so we can definitely speculate about the past.

And so a very, very simple example is usually when we tell the story of us and the Neanderthals, for example, we mentioned that most people, everybody outside of sub-Saharan Africa, and even some people within sub-Saharan Africa have some Neanderthal DNA. It’s like, wow, that’s mind boggling, amazing. And the way we got that was because our ancestors, some of them had sex with the Neanderthals. And I always joke, there’s a scandal in the family tree, so to speak.

But here’s where it gets really interesting, because usually that’s kind of where the conversation ends. And I think it’s bonkers to end there, because actually, I think there should be a follow up to that saying, what was that like? What was it like to be half Neanderthal and half Homo sapiens?

FLORA LICHTMAN: We have this clip, actually. I pulled this clip exactly to talk about. So let’s hear it, and then I want to get you to deconstruct it for us.

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– What must it have been like to have been a hybrid child? Did these children feel like they belonged, or were they teased and ostracized? We’ll never know. But what we do, because I held Oase 1 in my hands, is that they existed. And so somebody loved them, and somebody was raising them to adulthood. And so we tangibly know that the Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens, they didn’t just meet, they joined.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: I thought this was such an arresting moment in the series, because that narration made what was moments before on the screen just a skull into a human being, not like a human ancestor, but into a person. And I also felt like, wow, that’s a choice too.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah, it was a choice. OK, so there’s two things that I really need to say about this. One is that I hope that people understand that as an anthropologist, and particularly as an anthropologist who is of many cultures, shall we say– I’m British, but my parents are Arab– it would be weird, just as an anthropologist, forget my lived experience, but just as an anthropologist, for me to not say or to not ask the question, what was that like?

And also, what would the mother have been feeling? Would she be sitting there looking at her child, saying, I hope they look more like my people. I hope they, for example, they don’t look so Neanderthal so that the child doesn’t get teased and ostracized. But do you see how bizarre it would be to present a series on human evolution, and not to take those moments and to go into the human emotion?

FLORA LICHTMAN: But here’s the thing that I don’t understand. Why do you think this is such a tension in this genre? Like, in history, we lean into the idea that these are dramatic, emotional tales. Why has science always been sort of pitted against feeling? I don’t get it, truly.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I do think part of it is that we are neurotic about caveats. It’s like we’ve got these data points and we’re like, OK, but can I tell you the 10 caveats that come with these data points in this conclusion? And I feel like if I don’t tell you will judge me, and I’ll be misrepresenting this. And so I think that’s part of it. I think a lot of that comes from a really good place.

But I think it’s just the way we’ve done science. Look around you. We live in the post-truth era. Just stating facts to people isn’t enough. People need to feel moved. People need to feel a connection.

But I think it was a real journey and a real risk because we didn’t how people would respond. And I think I am quite confident in my background, I guess. I have a slightly unusual background, shall we say, coming from a creationist background and a missionary background. And so for me, I’m like, yo, guys, no, no, we’ve got to shake this up. We got to shake it up.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wait, tell me how that plays a role here.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So I have more or less not told this story until this summer. And what it is, is I was actually a missionary. I was a very, very active Muslim missionary. And I went to– I kind of love this. I went to University College London, which is just a very elite university. And for me, though, it was a real– put it like this.

My degree took place in the Darwin building, the place where Charles Darwin himself once lived. And so I do get a kick out of me kind of turning up as this, I guess, incredibly arrogant 18-year-old, just assuming that I could destroy this Charles Darwin fella’s theory. And then, I have to make a joke of it because it’s so ridiculous.

FLORA LICHTMAN: No, I love it. It reminds me of youth and what it was like to be young.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. Yeah, and natural selection stuff. All right, give me a minute with it, guys. Give me a minute. Almost 150 years of research hasn’t done it, but Ella Al-Shamahi will do it. Yeah. But I think, as much as I really kind of joke about it and laugh about it, I was really concerned in telling this story.

We humans are tribal, and that has been actually a huge boon. And people don’t always realize this because they see tribalism as kind of, ah, fighting, et cetera, et cetera. But actually, what it means is you coordinate more and you cooperate more with your own people, which actually leads to real success by and large.

But the thing is that the negative side of that is we love our people. And if one of my people turns around and has an opinion, and it’s the opinion of all my tribe, and some random person in a lab coat comes over and is just like, yeah, you’re wrong on that x, y, and z, I’m not just going to– I am not just going to abandon my tribe for this person in a lab coat. And I think in the way that we talk about the war on science– and I do feel that we can be incredibly derogatory to people who don’t believe the science. And I’m like, fine, I get where some of that comes from.

But you then need to understand, and I am telling you because I have this experience, this brutal period in my 20s, I know what it means to believe the science. And for some people, it means either leaving your tribe or schisming away from the thoughts of your tribe, and both of those are really difficult. The community that I kind of had to leave, this missionary world, I left them–

SPEAKER: After the break–

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: What has been really interesting in the space of 13 years, so many people who are deeply devout Muslims are now absolutely OK with the theory of evolution. And that didn’t come about because non-practicing Muslims like me or atheists or agnostics were sitting there kind of lecturing them.

It came about because people within that community– scholars, thinkers, scientists– were willing to do the work and willing to be the ambassadors for their own communities. So we have to be really, really careful about the way we talk to ambassadors from all religious, political, et cetera, et cetera persuasions, because they’re our gateways. And actually, we need to be bringing them on board even if we don’t agree with them on everything, because they’re the best communicators to their own people.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: We have to take a quick break, but don’t go away, because when we come back, out of all the human species that lived, why were we the only ones that survived?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: We were the underdog. And if you were to have lined us up even 100,000 years ago, and you were to line us all up, and you were to say, all right, who is your money on, I don’t it would have been on us.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s talk about some of what you cover in the series. Let’s talk about the story of our family tree. I feel like, first of all, this story is changing every day, which makes it very fun, as an outsider, to follow. I feel like when I started in this business, the story always was told where it started in East Africa. And there was this very specific Rift Valley that this is the cradle of civilization. It all began here. Does that idea still stand?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: No, it doesn’t. And so now we think we’re at least 300,000 years old. This process was across Africa. But I think most people look around today, and they see that we are clearly the most dominant form of life on Earth. And they just kind of assume that Homo sapiens turn up on the scene, and we were always destined for greatness. It was game over for everyone else.

And actually, what often the public don’t realize is that we were born into a world of many, many, many human species. We think there are at least six others wandering the planet at the same time. Loads of people are familiar with Neanderthals, but there are other species.

There’s a species called Homo floresiensis, which we kind of nicknamed them the Hobbit because they were basically the size of– they were about a meter tall, so that’s 3 and 1/2 feet tall, and they lived on this one island in Indonesia with elephant-like creatures that were miniature and the size of cows. It was a magical, magical kind of like– it almost sounds like I’m a child and making this stuff up, but I promise this is real science.

And so for me, I wanted the public to understand we were born into a world of many, and the really juicy cherry on that cake is that we were the underdog. And if you were to have lined us up even 100,000 years ago, and you were to line us all up, and you were to say, all right, who is your money on, I don’t it would have been on us.

In fact, there’s a really interesting example of a cave– two caves on Mount Carmel in Israel, where there was Neanderthals in one cave and there was a Homo sapiens cave. So this was a great neighborhood situation, and we think it was kind of around the same time. And one of them became locally extinct, and it wasn’t the Neanderthals. It was us. We became locally extinct.

So you can see, time upon time, these other species outpacing us, outcompeting us, or it being really tight. And then suddenly we arrive. But it’s not just that we arrive, it’s that we become the only species to survive. And we don’t just end there. We go on to build the pyramids and invent writing and build cities and technology the likes of which nobody has ever seen.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Why were we the underdog?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: We were the underdog, partly because we were incredibly inexperienced. So these other species had been evolving to their local geographies and landscapes for hundreds of thousands of years. I think the best case that we have of that, just because of the amount of data we have on it, is the Neanderthals.

So the Neanderthals, it’s very clear that we kept trying to enter into the Neanderthal territory, and it failed for a long, long time, for tens of thousands of years. We would enter into Europe and parts of Central Asia, and then it just wouldn’t work out and we’d become locally extinct. And then we’d do it again, and it was just it was never working.

And the best interpretation of that, in my opinion, and some people would disagree, is that the Neanderthals were just outcompeting us. And it makes sense. They also had immunities to local diseases that they had spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving to. There’s a really fascinating mutation that exists in Tibetans that means that they can exist at high altitude.

And they realized it came from the Denisovans, who some people might have heard of recently because they also got given the title “dragon man,” which is a brilliant name for a species, by the way, “dragon man.” So we think that they were probably living some of them at high altitude, and they’d already adapted to it. And then we come along and we interbreed with them, and it’s like a cheat.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is that the secret to our success, basically, getting it on with others?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I do think it really, really helped us. I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest secret, but I think it really helped us. I think probably the biggest thing is that we– it’s in some ways a bit boring. I think there was a lot of us. I think there was a lot of us, and we have a particular kind of brain that seems to be really interested in copying each other, this kind of neuroplasticity.

And I think when you get those kind of numbers with that kind of brain, what you end up with is this thing called cumulative culture, which is the idea that every generation builds upon the previous generation’s art, technology, science, et cetera, et cetera. And we are the only species, certainly living, that kind of does it. We’ve always been sold this lie, I would say, of the lone genius, and actually it’s loads and loads and loads of people inventing. And that, I think, is a huge reason for our success.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I know that you study Neanderthals. What do you like about them?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Neanderthals are our sister species. They’re our closest relatives. But the thing as well with Neanderthals is that they’ve constantly kind of been given this awful PR. They’ve been sold as these knuckle-dragging ape men.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s a diss.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah, yeah. Nobody’s calling you a Neanderthal out of respect, shall I say. And what you realize is that, actually, that is an interpretation that partly suited us. It really suited us to portray ourselves as this kind of pinnacle of human evolution.

And there are also some wonderful examples of Neanderthals beautifying themselves. You have a number of caves where you find that it looks like the Neanderthals were really after bright, iridescent feathers. And then you take a second and you go, oh my gosh. That is not the impression I had of Neanderthal.

But also, let me just say, telling the story of human evolution over 300,000 years, our species’ story kind of across, what, seven continents is an ambitious undertaking. I mean, I think in some ways the Americas episode was a very, very, very complicated one to tell because we were trying to tell it in a slightly different way. When people talk about the invention of agriculture and farming and cities, they always tell it in the Middle East. It’s always a Middle Eastern story. So the first time the invention of farming and cities turns up in our series is in the Americas.

And I get such a kick out of that because it means that farming and cities were inventions whose time had come. And if it hadn’t have happened in the middle–

FLORA LICHTMAN: What a profound idea.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: It would’ve happened somewhere. Isn’t that? And I think, again, this is something people don’t realize, that a lot of– you know sometimes there’s that, oh, who invented electricity? Who invented the telephone? It’s like, you know what? We know that there’s one person, then there’s always a competing name.

But actually, in reality, we could have wiped those two people off the map, and somebody else would have invented it, because that is just the nature. Once you have cumulative culture, once you have the kind of brains that we have and the number of people that we have, those inventions are just going to start coming.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Congratulations on the series, and thank you for trying to do something different with it. As a viewer, I appreciate it.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Thank you so much, Flora. Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Ella Al-Shamahi is a paleoanthropologist and host of the new documentary series Human, and you can binge it on the PBS app. And a severed heads-up that this year, because Halloween falls on a Science Friday, we are holding our first-ever spooky science Halloween costume contest. Are you dressing as a PFAS molecule or AI slop or Marie Curie for the 20th year in a row? If so, this contest is for you. Send us a pic of you in your cleverest, science inspired costume and you could win some fabulous Sci Fri swag. Find out more at sciencefriday.com/halloween.

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Today’s episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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