Early humans and Neanderthals: our close relatives

0:00Have modern humans always been the only kind of human on Earth?

0:04No, there were others. This timeline covers the last 400,000 years, with today at the right.

0:12Neanderthals were another kind of human, living from about 400,000 years ago.

0:19They lived across Europe and western Asia.

0:22They had strong, stocky bodies that suited the cold, and brains as big as ours.

0:29They made stone tools, used fire and hunted large animals.

0:34Meanwhile our own species, Homo sapiens, began in Africa about 300,000 years ago.

0:42Neanderthals were not the species we came from, but our close relatives, like cousins on the human family tree.

0:49When modern humans spread out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, the two groups met.

0:56They lived side by side for thousands of years, and some had children together.

1:02Then, about 40,000 years ago, the Neanderthals died out.

1:07No one knows exactly why, but a changing climate and competition with modern humans may have played a part.

1:14But they are not completely gone, because many people today carry about 2 percent Neanderthal DNA.

1:22Neanderthals were our close relatives, who lived beside us and then died out about 40,000 years ago.