This week is our first two-parter ever! I don't intend to do that often but there was just too much to go over for one episode. This week we'll talk about humans: where we come from, how we evolved, and who our closest cousins are--Neanderthals and Denisovans. Some young humans. Humans can do many surprising things, including surfing, making stained glass, and repairing helicopters. Most humans like the color blue and enjoy listening to music. The bracelet found with Denisovan bones in a Siberian cave. Humans didn't make or wear this lovely thing, Denisovan people did. Further reading: How to Think Like a Neandertal by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This will be our first two-part episode. There’s so much to cover with this topic that I decided to split it into two. This week we’re going to investigate an unusual family of great apes: both the living representative and their extinct relatives—and I don’t know why I’m saying “their extinct relatives,” because the great apes in question are known as Homo sapiens. Humans tend to view ourselves as separate from the natural world. Some of us see ourselves as special, above other animals and better than them. Some of us see ourselves as despoilers of nature who can’t be trusted at all. But in reality, we’re neither angels nor devils. We’re animals too, and we fit neatly in the world because we evolved to live here, just like every other animal did too. Humans have two major things going for us. First of all, we’re really smart. We’re only now learning the ways other animals show high intelligence, but even so, hands down we are the brightest apes in the circus. Our intelligence allows us to invent amazing things to make our lives more comfortable, like beds and shoes and medicine and umbrellas and podcasts. Unfortunately, our intelligence also lets us invent things that aren’t so nice, like bombs, because like our close cousins the chimpanzees, we can be real jerks. But besides our intelligence, which is an obvious plus, we’ve got something very few other animals have: stamina, and the ability to shed heat efficiently, which makes us tireless hunters. In fact, that combined with our ability to make and use tools made early humans pretty much unstoppable. Persistence hunting is only practiced by a few species of animal, like grey wolves, spotted hyenas, and humans. Humans aren’t especially fast runners compared to horses and deer and other prey animals, but we can just run on and on, sweating to cool ourselves, while our prey has to rest to cool down. One downside to this is that we can drive ourselves to heat exhaustion without realizing it, when conditions are just too hot to be constantly active. I just looked this up, because I just realized I didn’t know if other female animals menstruate like human women. It turns out that female chimps do, along with a few other primates—and bats, for some reason. Solidarity with our bat girlfriends. Actually, all placental mammals prepare a womb lining periodically, but when it turns out they don’t need it because they’re not going to have babies, they just reabsorb the material. Only a few species shed it, and even in humans we reabsorb most of it. Some researchers think we menstruate because it’s actually easier on the body to just dump the last of that unused stuff rather than spend extra energy absorbing it. Now that we all know a few things about humans that we might not have known before, here’s a somewhat simplified overview of how humans evolved. Humans and our ancestors are called hominins collectively. There were some apes 6 or 7 million years ago that were probably somewhat bipedal, and which are considered the earliest known hominins. We’re not sure which of the several species is our direct ancestor and which is our last shared ancestor with gorillas and chimpanzees.