00:00 The remains of some of the oldest anatomically modern humans in Europe, found in a cave called Peshtera su Oase, showed evidence of Neanderthal ancestry, with one individual having a Neanderthal ancestor as recent as four to six generations ago.

04:46 Humans are the product of a tangled series of intersecting branches and encounters of interbreeding between various groups of archaic humans, resulting in a story of diversity and hybridization that is much more complicated and varied than previously thought.

09:23 The fact that Antequesor isn't a direct ancestor of humans gives insight into the broad landscape of human diversity, with many closely related groups that interbred but most of them being dead-ends, making it difficult to determine our precise ancestors.

13:34 The genetic differences between human populations are small, populations are not races or ethnic groups, and everyone has diverse ancestors from all over the world, but ancient DNA extraction offers valuable insights into the past, revealing that Neanderthals were the ancestors of our closest cousins and that our ancestors interbred with other archaic humans.

18:10 Our direct ancestors were just one of many populations of archaic humans, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, and every living group of modern humans has ancestry from at least one population of archaic humans.

22:10 Neanderthals had different body proportions and physical adaptations compared to anatomically modern humans, likely due to their hunting strategies and the environments they lived in, and they were also intelligent and skilled hunters with advanced hunting strategies and sophisticated stone tool technology.

26:18 Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans both used the Le Valois technique to create a variety of tools, indicating that they had similar levels of technological sophistication, and there is evidence that Neanderthals engaged in complex behaviors such as speech, art, jewelry-making, and deliberate burial of their dead, suggesting that they were not significantly less cognitively advanced than modern humans.

30:26 Archaeologists excavating Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia discovered a tiny fragment of a finger bone that belonged to an adolescent Denisovan, a previously unknown human lineage, which was confirmed through the extraction of DNA from the bone by geneticist Svante Pabo and his team.

35:10 The Denisovans, a previously unknown human lineage, interbred with present-day populations such as Melanesians, Popuans, and Aboriginal Australians, and further analysis revealed interbreeding events with other modern human ancestors, including the ancestors of modern Tibetans who inherited high-altitude adaptations from a Denisovan group, suggesting that Denisovans were a separate branch of the human family tree with more ancestry shared with Neanderthals than modern humans, and while their appearance is still uncertain, their teeth were large and they were robustly built, with the genetic evidence suggesting that Denisovans were likely a broad category that included several different groups that interbred with different modern human populations at different times and places, with small traces of Denisovan ancestry found in mainland East Asia and a different interbreeding event occurring in Southeast Asia, and Denisovans also interbred with another unknown species of human, likely a descendant of Homo erectus, which contributed about 3-6% of ancestry to the Denisovans and diverged from the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans between 900,000 and 1.4 million years ago.

39:29 An adolescent girl was found to be a hybrid, the first generation offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father, revealing the complex relationships between different groups of archaic and early modern humans, including interbreeding events and the replacement of maternal lines.

43:54 The history of humans is a complex tapestry of different populations, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, who interbred and contributed to the genetic makeup of modern humans, leading to a patchwork of hybrid species throughout our evolutionary past.