Writer And Geek Show

What happened to our neanderthal cousins?{00:00} Contrary to popular belief, Columbus did not actually discover America. Almost 500 years before Columbus, Lief Ericsson, a Viking, landed on the coast of Newfoundland. But even he wasn’t the first to reach Americas. Native Americans had already migrated to this region thousands of years ago.{02:50} We discovered the existence of Neanderthals in 1856 when quarrymen found the fossils of human-like species in the Neander Valley in Germany. In the 1820s, a skull was discovered which belonged to a neanderthal girl. But this discovery did not get much attention.{04:28} Neanderthals lived in caves which were intricate in design with many passages and were dark. Everything happened inside these caves, everything! They had a social life where the young took care of the old. After death, the buried the corpse and they were very interested in making jewellery, paintings and carvings.{06:32} The biological characteristics of Neanderthals were different from human beings to