Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedDavid Reich: belief
8 May 2026 Dwarkesh Podcast David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
“The Middle Stone Age and Middle Paleolithic Revolution that they share with modern humans is more fundamentally a part of who they are, in some sense, than we think.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- David Reich
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 8 May 2026
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…Connecting them would be interbreeding events or being in the same place at the same time that we missed? There’s a known interbreeding event from the lineage leading to modern humans into Neanderthals, but it’s supposed to be only 5%. I’m interested in the possibility that that 5% is actually a sign of something much more impactful, that somehow Neanderthals are in some sense deeply modern in some ways, and even though they get swamped by archaic genes, they actually have more of a modern impact than one would think. The Middle Stone Age and Middle Paleolithic Revolution that they share with modern humans is more fundamentally a part of who they are, in some sense, than we think. Interesting. Sorry, when was this interbreeding event?…
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