Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals

From the moment when the first known Neanderthal skeleton was discovered in modern-day Germany in 1856, our understanding of these ancient ancestors has been a work in progress. And, as this instalment of the YouTube series Howtown explores, these decades of archaeology and scientific research have forced an important, ongoing conversation about how we understand ourselves. First, the hosts Adam Cole and Joss Fong provide a brief history of Neanderthal discovery, as well as a rundown of how contemporary scientists view the Neanderthals’ place in evolutionary history today. Then, speaking with a series of experts, Cole takes a detailed dive into how, exactly, scientists arrived at the growing consensus that human-Neanderthal interbreeding means that there’s a little bit of Neanderthal in everyone’s family tree.