Svante Pääbo

Well, this is, this is a mystery.

So, so people who study, um, the DNA of ancient species, um, such as Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, who won the Nobel Prize last year for his discovery of the genome, his pioneering methods to get the genome of Neanderthals.

But as they say, they're, they're distinct, uh, genetically, but, uh, my view of Homo erectus is that, uh, that's who we are, and we came out of Homo erectus.

Mm-hmm.

... uh, feel free to steal his thunder in any way that, that you feel moved.

Uh, my husband, Ed Green, was part of Svante Pääbo's group when they were assembling the Neanderthal genome, and so he spent a lot of time thinking about Neanderthal.

I think what's interesting from a species concept, w- if we start there, with what's going on with Neanderthals, is w- we now know based on studying DNA, both from Neanderthals that used to be alive and a different lineage of human called a Denisovan, we, we call it this, that was first isolated again by Svante Pääbo's research group from a tiny little finger bone that they found in a cave, Denisova Cave in Russia, that's why they're called Denisovans.

We know that there were multiple different species or lineages or whatever you want to call them of human-like people that were alive at the same time, and we know that after people moved out of Africa to colonize Europe, they met our ancestors, Homo sapiens, anatomically modern humans, everything you wanna call them, they met groups of Neanderthals, and they bred with them.

So if they were a different species, they were violating the biological species concept at this point.