At 18:35 he explains that Neanderthals were cousins to human, not ancestors, and died out in Europe about 30,000 years ago. The last common ancestors were at least 800k years ago.
Later he explains that non-Africans today have Neanderthal DNA, and that this necessarily means that we non-Africans are all descended from Neanderthals.
So Neanderthals were not cousins. They were direct ancestors.
He also explains how Neanderthals were more advanced than the African so-called humans. Neanderthals buried their dead ceremoniously, made tools, wore jewelry, and drew cave art. The Africans of the time did not.
He keeps saying that humans came out of Africa, but the facts show the opposite. The earliest beings that could be called human were the Neanderthals, and they lived in Europe.
The argument that humans came from Africa is based on it having a greater variation of ape DNA. That is true. If you trace humans back to ape ancestors, then those apes lived in Africa. But the human ancestors lived in Europe.
The recent Science Friday discussed research on modern inheritance of Neanderthal genes. He also referred to Neanderthals as our extinct relatives, but they are not really extinct since they have billions of descendants living today. He said we have about 2% of our genome directly traceable to Neanderthals, but the rest of our genes are shared with Neanderthals also, as all mammals have mostly the same genes, with minor differences.
Anthropologists like to talk about our supposed African ancestor humans, like Hollywood likes the Magical Negro trope. I am not sure why this trope is so effective.
I am also not sure why experts would call Neanderthals cousins, extinct, and non-humans, when those are plainly false. They were the most human of our ancestors of 100k years ago.
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