Let's answer some questions from the internet.

This is Caveman Support.

At Sean Spain asks, How did cavemen hunt with clubs?

Animals are really fast.

We often think of cavemen as having clubs.

They probably use clubs.

But we know that by the time humans were moving into Ice Age Europe that they had really long spears, like six or seven feet tall.

And we know sometimes they were tipping those spears with stone like this to make lethal, sharp, stabbing spears.

Early modern humans had real long-range projectile weaponry like bow and arrow and in some places spear throwers.

The spear has a nock on the other end which fits into that hook.

And so the spear would just be held parallel to the spear thrower.

And then when you throw it, it allows you to propel the spear over a distance of about 40 meters or about 120 feet.

At Karen Ryden asks, I did 23 and me.

I had 89% of the Neanderthal variant of all in their system.

What does that mean?

You have more Neanderthal genes than 89% of the people who've submitted their DNA.

Now most of us only have a small proportion of Neanderthal genes.

Only about 1 to 4%.

Early members of our species migrated out of Africa.

They met and sometimes interbred with the Neanderthals.

So if you have any ancestry from Europe or from Asia, you probably have got some Neanderthal genes.

We have complete genomes of several Neanderthals.

We're able to know, for instance, that some Neanderthals had red hair.

So you might think, hey, if I have red hair, maybe I got that from Neanderthals.

But it actually turns out that it is a different gene that causes the red hair in Neanderthals.

So not all redheads are descended from Neanderthals.

But because most redheads are European, most redheads have got some Neanderthal genes in them.

You think Ice Age is historically accurate?

Well, it actually is pretty, pretty accurate.

You see in this clip here some animals moving past these gigantic thick ice sheets.

Most of the animals that are depicted in Ice Age, giant ground sloths, woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, were actually around here in North America.

In places, the ice sheets were as much as two and a half miles thick.

And I love the way that they depict the barren land and just dirt around the glaciers.

When you have ice sheets like that, you get deserts forming right up against them because the ice sheets suck all the moisture out of the atmosphere and create snow over the ice sheets.

I think that the humans that they depict are also pretty accurate.

They're shown wearing tailored clothing.

We find bone needles in the archaeological record beginning about 30,000 years ago.

And that indicates people were able to stitch together clothing.

But there are a couple things that are inaccurate.

You wouldn't see animals up near the ice sheets.

Animals live where their plants grow.

And the other thing is there are no saber-toothed squirrels in the fossil record.

At AndyDoodle56 asks, OK, paleoanthropology nerds, what species is the Geico caveman anyway?

Well, let's see.

Looking at the brow ridge morphology and the really big nose and the facial architecture, it looks a lot like a Neanderthal.

At Shrestha Alishna asks, What happened to Neanderthals?

Well, frankly, I think we did them in.

Modern humans moved into their territory, out-competed them, and out-reproduced them.

They were short and stocky and very muscular.

They also had short limbs, short arms and short legs.

So that reduced the surface area by which they lost heat.

And they had kind of a strange architecture of the nose and face, which also helped them deal with cold air that they were breathing.

Those bodies were really good at producing heat, but that's not good for conserving energy.

They had very costly bodies.

They were costly to move, costly to feed, costly to keep warm.

And so they didn't have a lot of room left over in their energy budgets to devote to reproducing.

They had a lot of competition in the form of large, fierce carnivores.

Things like cave lions, cave hyenas, saber-toothed cats, wolves, grizzly bears.

And so probably for much of their history in Europe, Neanderthals were just hanging on by a thread.

At Roxy Notlalande asks, Hey, where did early humans live?

If you look at the earliest stages of human evolution, the first four million years is entirely here in Africa, where we've got little ape men, the Australopiths.

We find them here in the Rift Valley, in East Africa, in countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia.

And we find them in Southern Africa in cave systems outside of Johannesburg.

By about two and a half million years, members of our own genus, like Homo habilis, start to crop up.

And that includes Homo erectus.

And Homo erectus is the first one to actually leave Africa.

We pick up Homo erectus initially in the Republic of Georgia, and then eventually in Indonesia.

And you might wonder, how did Homo erectus get to Indonesia?

Those are islands out there.

Keep in mind, this is during the ice ages.

And during glacial intervals, sea levels drop.

And in places where there's a shallow sea, the seafloor becomes exposed, and Indonesia just becomes a peninsula connected to the southern part of Asia.

And so Homo erectus could walk out to those islands.

Meanwhile, a new species emerges.

It comes out of Homo erectus.

Most of us would call it Homo heidelbergensis.

It looks like this guy right here.

The very Homo erectus looking with big brow ridges and a massive face.

These guys up here in Europe gives rise to the Neanderthals.

And in Africa, they evolve into our own species, Homo sapiens, about 300,000 years ago.

And by about 70,000 years ago, they started expanding out of Africa.

And they probably encountered populations of Homo erectus, which they knocked off.

And by 40,000 years ago, they are moving into Europe and starting to encounter the Neanderthals, who they knock off.

And by about 20,000 years, they're all the way up here in eastern Siberia.

And they cross the Bering Land Bridge, where they become the Native Americans that we know today.

At Reality Seeker asks, did cavemen have a sense of humor?

They probably did have a sense of humor.

This is a depiction of an ibex, which is a kind of a wild goat.

You know, you can see its head here and its body and its legs.

And it's got something coming out of its rear end here, which maybe is the first poop joke.

At imrwkali asks, how did humans survive the ice age?

Gosh, I can hardly bear to be outside for more than five minutes when the temperature drops below zero degrees Celsius.

Neanderthals had fire, sure.

But these early modern humans in Europe probably had better pyrotechnology.

Parts which channeled the airflow so they could really stoke the fire.

When the ice ages really ramped up, they stayed put and they just hunkered down and dealt with it.

At A Hasty Retweet asks, you know how they discovered those fossils of three feet tall early humans in Indonesia?

They called them hobbits as a nickname, which is really cool, but they really missed an opportunity to call them Neander-shorts.

I'm totally going to steal that one because that's at the intersection of dad jokes and paleoanthropology.

The hobbits are a species of early human, and they come from a little island in Indonesia called Flores Island.

So the species is called Homo floresiensis.

These guys are the descendants of Homo erectus.

Homo erectus got out onto Flores Island, got trapped there.

When you get trapped on an island, if you're a small bodied mammal, like a small rodent or something, you tend to get larger.

If you're a larger bodied mammal, you tend to get smaller, which is called island dwarfism.

And so these little hobbits find themselves living in a backdrop of giant rats and tiny dwarf elephants called stegadon and being hunted by things like Komodo dragons.

At Caleb Llama asks, honest question, did cavemen have pets?

The only domesticated animal that we have during the Stone Age is the dog.

The earliest undisputed dogs in the fossil record come from a site in Germany called Bonn Oberkassel, where there is a human buried with a dog.

They're used to help with hunting.

They're used to help fend off carnivores.

We don't start to see things like cattle or goats until humans settle down and start engaging in agriculture after about 10,000 years ago.

At worldofpaleoanth asks, how did the A. afarensis specimen dubbed Lucy get her name?

Lucy is a 3.2 million year old partial skeleton from Ethiopia that represents the species Australopithecus afarensis, and she's one of the most famous fossils out there.

She was found in 1974.

The team that found her was playing the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds incessantly in camp, and they named Lucy in honor of that song.

At Fifo Kazweedie asks, things I'm too tired to Google.

When did hominins start having hair that grows indefinitely long?

In a quadruped, most of the sunshine is falling on their back, and the hair protects their skin.

They don't have as much hair in the belly because it's shady down there.

For a biped, most of the solar radiation is falling on the top of the head, and the shoulders, and the upper part of the back.

So Homo erectus probably retained hair on the top of the head to block out solar radiation and evolved the capacity to grow it longer to protect the head, shoulders, and the upper part of the back from sunburn.

At bzieg73 asks, so like, what did cavemen do about dental hygiene?

Well, unfortunately, probably not much.

We do have some fossils which denote habitual use of toothpicks, where they've used toothpicks so much that they've actually created little grooves in their teeth.

But before that, we've got guys like this guy from Africa.

He's about 250,000 years old.

He's a representative of Homo heidelbergensis, and he's got absolutely rotten teeth with huge cavities, probably because he was eating a lot of honey.

He's got a hole in the side of his head here, which is probably from an infection from bacteria entering the bloodstream from these cavities and circulating around and setting up an infection in the side of his skull, and this is probably what killed him.

At twinz25464257 asks, what's your favorite ancient hominid, my paleoanthropology friends?

Oh, that's like asking me to pick my favorite child.

I will say that these guys are one of my favorites, a 250,000 year old species called Homo naledi.

I was a member of a team that found them in caves in South Africa, down a chute, which is about 40 feet long and gets down to about seven inches wide, way too small for me to get in there.

We actually needed an entire crew of small bodied excavators to get down into this chamber.

They have an ape-sized brain.

They have very primitive morphology in the face.

They're probably one of the most primitive members of our genus, but very late in time.

There are relic species that just hung on without changing very much through time until we find them in the caves of South Africa.

At blueslicker asks, what is the missing link between ape and man?

Well, as a paleoanthropologist, I gotta tell you, we hate the term missing link.

And that kind of thinking leads to conceptions of a march of progress where evolution is just a stepwise series of progressive changes through time.

But the human family tree was very, very bushy.

There were lots of species.

We recognize anywhere from 28 to 30 of them.

At roughly 6 million years ago, our lineage began to diverge from the lineage that leads to living chimpanzees and bonobos.

Our earliest ancestors would look like a chimpanzee, like this chimp skull here.

They had very snouty faces like a chimpanzee, but you'd be impressed by the fact that they're walking on two legs and that their canine teeth, this big fang here was actually a little bit smaller.

But other than that, they're very chimpanzee-like.

At shrub plays asks, if Gigantopithecus existed, why can't Bigfoot?

Why not indeed?

Gigantopithecus was a huge ape.

If it was standing on its hind legs, it was probably about eight feet tall, maybe twice the size of a gorilla with a huge head and huge teeth.

They probably lived on bamboo like panda bears.

And they lived in Asia up until about a half million years ago.

And some people have thought that maybe the Yeti in the Himalayas or Bigfoot in North America are just relic populations of Gigantopithecus.

That would require that Gigantopithecus crossed the Bering Sea into North America without leaving any kind of fossil record.

But maybe that happened.

At Patrick's son asks, bro, when did language start?

If we look at Neanderthals, they have brains which were every bit as big as ours.

And they seem to have the neural structures that one would need to produce language.

We can tell from holes for nerves in the base of the skull that they had very good motor control of their tongues.

Neanderthals had a very long, low brain case and a more projecting face.

And that results in a flatter base of the skull.

So Neanderthals probably could only produce one or two vowel sounds.

In our species, Homo sapiens, our face is tucked up more under the brain case.

And we have a more globular cranial vault.

And that creates a bend in the base of the brain case.

We have flexion here.

This flexion gives us a resonating space that allows us to make the full range of vowel sounds.

Keep in mind that even monkeys and apes use verbal communication.

There are things like pant hoots and chimpanzees, which mean something to their group members.

At seven light bringers asks, what the did cavemen do for fun?

Well, probably not a lot to tell you the truth.

We know in the later part of the Paleolithic or the Stone Age, that they're making some musical instruments because we've recovered flutes made out of bird bones.

People don't start painting on cave walls until modern humans are in Europe towards the end of the Ice Age.

What's really cool about these cave paintings is they often tend to make use of features and relief in the walls of the cave, such that if you had a fire going in the chamber of the cave, the flickering of the fire would make these animals look like they're moving.