Marked Neander valley, Germany

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Neanderthals and Denisovans

Two other kinds of human lived in Europe and Asia while our species was in Africa, and met our ancestors when they spread out of it. Most people alive today carry a little Neanderthal DNA; many in Asia and Oceania carry Denisovan DNA too.

Place
Neander valley, Germany · Shanidar Cave, Iraq · Denisova Cave, Russia · Gorham’s Cave, GibraltarEurope, Asia, The Middle East
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IThe bones in the Neander valley
  2. IIHow Neanderthals lived
  3. IIIDenisovans: a people known from a finger bone
  4. IVMeeting our species
  5. VWhy did they disappear?

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Svante Pääbo
  • Johann Carl Fuhlrott

Objects

  • The Feldhofer skull
  • The Denisova finger bone
  • Engraved lines in Gorham’s Cave

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

402,000 years ago to 42,000 years ago. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?