What on Earth is HLD 6? 

*Smacks earth* You can fit so many skeletons in this thing.

"The middle pleistocene: it's almost exclusively monkey wrenches." I'd buy that tee-shirt.

You and your channel are awesome. No one else has explained this stuff to me as much and as well as you have. Thank you for your efforts and passion. I appreciate your fight against non/bad-science people and their nonsense too. Our species is stronger with your existence.

I resent the term "monkey wrench" in this context. The fossil record clearly shows Hominids have more recent common ancestors with box wrenches and crescent wrenches.

In my experience, digging up distant relatives always produces more questions than answers. Like, why was my great great grandfather buried without his head? And what is it about my mother's side being buried with all these little silver balls?

How can this throw a monkey wrench into our understanding of hominid linesges when there are still monkey wrenches?

I’m glad you keep us updated. The rate of gaining knowledge is so incredible. Just 21 years ago, extracting DNA from a snail collected pre-WW2 was considered quite an accomplishment (I failed, yet no one laughed) and now there’s enough data to compare species that went extinct well before the last ice age.

Too many “monkey wrenches,” eh Erika? I see what you did there!

Always good to see another paleoanthro video from Erika.

You’re such a great science communicator, I just started teaching a lab for the first time and it’s crazy how hard it is to convey the info in my head to people who haven’t heard that stuff before without sounding crazy

Somebody with Photoshop skills needs to make a cereal box showing a bowl full of skulls, called Middle Pleistocene: OOPS! All Hominins!

How many videos on paleo-anthropology have me smiling like a giddy child? Just about all of yours have that effect on me. The ability to inject enthusiasm into, what can be, dry subjects is astonishing. Love all that you do. Keep it up!

"more questions' = more job security for scientists.

Nice reenactment of the "how can I hold all these" meme hahaha

Theist: "There is not any transitional fossils, therefore god" Erika: "No, we have too many transitional fossils, so we don't know the exact evolutionary tree" Theist: "See I was right, there are too many transitional fossils, therefore god" Erika: "Sigh"

Thanks for keeping this humanities nerd updated on cool science. :D

3:34 - loved the way the subtitles tell us that the prototypical example of the Denisovans was a young lady called "Denise Evans"! 😂

How did I just find this channel? Great content, well presented. Thank you.

I love your work. It is so interesting learning about potential sister species and our ancestors.

"Now, i know what you're thinking..." i was not thinking that.

the armful of skulls at the beginning of the video was giggle inducing

All this is so exciting! Thank you so much for these wonderful videos Erika! ❤

Was there a period of unusually rapid hominin diversification here? Would there be any interesting implications of that if there were?

Another terrific video. Can't tell you how much I learn from your work!

Omg I love your enthusiasm and passion! I'm just teaching myself about evolution from your and others channels and it's so cool to see someone so psyched to talk about what they so clearly love. Also Kris Jenner?? Damn, what can't she do?? A momager and human biology queen 😍👑

Oh good, I needed a fun palette cleanser sort of video right about now. Thank you for delivering, Erika!

A pleasure to see other folks are as impressed by you as I was when you had under 5K subscribers. You continue marvelous.

I used to love modelling with pleistocene when I was a kid.

I'm really excited to watch this video, and I'm glad to say that this content was a helpful factor in deciding to go into anthropology as a major :) Thanks!

This is really helpful! More like this please. 😊

One of my favorite content creators with a really fun & interesting episode on our early ancestors and distant cousins!

Love this video, please keep making these. The YEC debunking is low hanging fruit but detailing the hominid phylogeny with new finds is needed. Thanks

I really like that you don't dumb down terminology and methodology but yet make the information understandable..

I swear I thought you were going to say, "The problem is, with more fossils... comes great responsibility"! 😊

Brilliant Erika! I did a unit of anthropology almost 30 years and loved it but developed a different career path. I love tuning in for updates and geeking out. Thanks for your channel and enthusiasm! Great work!

You always put out the best stuff!. Keep it up and thank you!

Your enthusiasm isn't overwhelming, yet quite contagious 👍🏻 Subscribed 👍🏻 👍🏻 👍🏻 Hey, I have 4 thumbs... Another species 🙌

Super interesting! I only understand a fraction of it and need to listen at least two more times. So exciting to see all the pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle coming together.

I love this channel! Anthropology related work is secretly my dream job. Plus, it is so refreshing to see a younger and attractive girl make youtube videos like this, that are actually thought provoking, well thought out, intelligent, and actually provide important videos that will enlighten and often educate people in topics such as debunking (YEC), which is something so badly needed here in America especially! But her channel dives deeper, and is so much more than that. Keep it up Erika! Love the work that ur doing! 🙈🙉🙊 🤘🏼🐵🤘🏼

I've never been this early! LET'S GOOOO HOMININS!!!!!

Using "monkey wrenches" when talking about monkeys (hominens) made me laugh.

What a great episode! Your enthusiasm is very contagious!

Thanks Erica! Great breakdown of some fascinating new info!

👍👍 How cool! I love to see additions like this to the fossil record!

You're the best my favorite channel!

This video is brilliant. By far the best explanation (for a lay person) I have seen. I’m about to watch for a second time to take extensive notes. Thank you so much!! Keep it coming

Awesome video! I was so happy to see it drop and this is particularly interesting to me. And a perfect length, too. I"m so glad a subscribed! I'd not have found out about this paper-I"m not in the loop enough (I"m a layperson). I'm really pleased.

Fascinating stuff, Erika! Thanks for the lesson. 👍

Thank you! You answered many of my questions.

She blinded me with science!

Nice, thanks for hte update! Always love finds that shed more light into grey areas. :)

I loved this, Erica! Your excitement and enthusiasm is contagious ❤

So much information while I have my morning coffee. Great stuff !

At what point do we have enough species to move past the "monkey wrenches" and reach "Barrel of Monkeys" status?

Hybridisation is common. The branches often get entangled muddling holophyletic trees.

It would be great if we could go back and see all these different humanoid races

I really appreciate how you break everything down for us!

I cracked up from the first 10 seconds, seeing Erika exasperated while holding 5 different skulls with another 6 (hominin) skulls in the back is the perfect channel descriptor

No one talks with the passion that you shows, i love your videos

Love everything about this channel.

Got to admire your genius, keeping all those species and their relationships straight. You should have your PhD soon. 😂

I love your videos, I can't wait for the intro to make a comeback!

It was hilarious when you said “I know what you’re thinking,” to which I usually think, “probably not” because… well it’s usually not. But then you actually said what I WAS thinking! It was a first in my RU-vid experience

I'm a layperson who watches a lot of RU-vid vids on this sort of stuff. It's all very fascinating. Your presentation is very clear, and not too slow or too fast for me. Thanks and thumbs up.

For every one missing link found, there's another two created.

How exciting! I love a good mystery :)

As much as I like Creationist takedowns but Erika talking paleoanthropology is the real deal.

Wonderful presentation. Clear and entertaining.

Another great presentation GG. Thanks.

I loved this one Especially because it was short and to the point

You are such an amazing communicator. Keep it up.

Erika, Thanks for this video - your content selection is excellent and your delivery style is exceptional.

For some reason the old saying " if your not confused your not sufficiently well informed" comes to mind.

I love the "too much" gag at the beginning because I worked at a lot of pharmacies and that job is just ridiculous. Pharmacists have to memorize every damn pill on the market by what they do and what they look like, each company has their own different appearance, some of them have six different dosage formats, and some interact poorly with others... I would watch my bosses work with uncomprehending awe at how they could keep all that stuff in their head. Behold now ye _hominid fossils._ Hominin. Catarrhine. Et cetera. Specialists are amazing. You see a fragment of an occipital arch and can pinpoint exactly what it is, while I don't even know if that's a real thing because I just slapped two words together in a combination I thought sounded likely. It makes me, someone who's never had any deep interest in anything, feel small and useless. Which I am. But it's okay because I get to be surrounded by impassioned people who know more than I do. I like linguistics, but I'm a hobbyist _at best._ Brandishing an armful of skulls is just... it hits me the right way.

You are good! Your presentation was very clear and interesting

This is my favorite of all the videos you've done! I woke up thinking about it.

This is a good video. Very informative! Thank you, Erika.

I agree with many of the other comments, namely that you explain so much about this entire subject in a way that nobody else does quite so successfully. And your almost, but not quite, bonkers enthusiasm only adds to the allure! Listening to you, but also other people expert on their subjects, when compared to the creationists - especially the so-called young Earth, creationist fools - and flat Earthers etc, it is clear that your fluency of knowledge is 100% authentic, and almost anybody included in the above groupings of pseudo ‘knowledge’ believers, sounds utterly dumb and unconvincing by comparison. I hope you continue to spread the joy, not least as a mouthpiece for the thousands upon thousands of other true scientists, doing research into all areas regarding evolution, regardless of wherever along the evolution timeline, those scientists choose to hang their hat. Thank you!

Oh wow, I heard about this a week or so ago and emailed asking what you knew of it, hadn't seen this video.

Thank u Erica for yr fascinating content. Will be interested to follow this outcome once the dna can be analysed

Interesting stuff that I wouldn't have otherwise heard of! Being a sociologist and a university-trained futurist myself, the biology of humans -- and how we became human -- is of tangental interest to me, but you make it interesting. Thanks for that! And, as an aside, how're the PhD studies coming along? Are we likely to see Dr. Erika anytime soon? I do hope you're doing well with the studies -- I was eleven years into a PhD program when narcolepsy lifted its sleepy head long enough to say, "Uh . . . no. Maybe some other time . . . ." Then it dropped its head back to the pillow, and I realized that I had more work ahead of me than I could accomplish in the year I had left. When you make it through (sending much confidence your way!), I hope you'll be able to livestream your investiture with all the robes and accoutrements!

it's cool to imagine that there used to be other kinds of people, just existing alongside our ancestors

Science is finding a lot of prehistoric humans and hominids I find all of them so incredibly fascinating and interesting. I study this stuff myself I love Paleo Anthropology thank you very much.

Wonderful video, just the right length. Now I need to have a lie down and let all the knowledge soak in.

As a physicist looking at those four graphs (11:00), I'd say they tell us basically nothing. HLD 6 is within the range of variation (whiskers) of any of those groups, with the exception of Recent Modern Humans in A (we knew that anyway from the date) and Late Pleistocene in C. Any random individual from one of those groups will show up as slightly higher than average on some measures and lower than average on others.

I love how Paleoanthropology has both not enough specimens and too specimens at the same time. This is what I got a bachelor's in and it is wild.

So lonely that we're the only humans left. I really hope the rumors of surviving Floresiensis turn out to be true. What a game changer! 😊

I study art and the thing that facinates me endlessly is the evolution of all the cognitive abilities needed to make art. The borderline between what can be described as art and what is not yet describable as art is what keeps me up at night, litteraly. One of these “things” I find very fascinating is manuports, as there is not much research done on them(luckily that’s slowly changing!), they span a humongous span of time(oldest most likely example is the Makapansgat Cobble from around 3 milions years old) to very recently(Ellen Finn did a good research about manuports on bronze age Crete), and maybe even today. They are incredibly human things and defying of all the little boxes and definitions we humans love so much. I assume you already know what they are but maybe for others it’s handy to explain what the hell i am writing about: manuports are objects/artifacts taken from their original context moved by humans and their (direct) ancestors to a new location, thus creating a contrast, juxtaposition by simply being somewhere else. They stand out, are odd things, exotic and intriguing. They are objects that don’t seem to have a direct practical function like for example a tool has. Their use/reason for being somehwere seems to be purely because of cultural reasons. They can be wide range of things, like the Makapansgat Cobble being jasper found 30 km away from the closest source of that jasper. They can be fossils collected by our ancestors(Erfoud site in Marocco, a fossilized fish that looks suspiciously like a d**k was found amongst tools, there is no other marine fossils in the region closeby so it had to be taken to that place), riverbed stones found on top of a mountain, being carried up the mountain and probably ritualistically deposited on top of said mountain. Or a random single chunk of chert found on an island near Australia that doesn’t have and never had any chert. They are usually unaltered, sometimes they are but they are never manufactured by humans. The first evidence of painting is also found in the form of manuports, as in caves heametite pebbles are found far away from the closest source, with wear patters that strongly suggest they where used as unbelievably old rock crayons. It’s a really fascinating subject, quite geeky as it’s litteraly stones and rocks most of the time but the implications they have for our understanding of when things like abstract thinking, a sense of aesthetic, culture got more complicated, etc, etc are big. I’ve written the equivalent of a Wikapedia page here so I’ll stop. Thanks for the video and have a nice day everyone!

Brilliant breakdown!

Here just to show support and give props. You are super brilliant and talented. Love the channel even though sometimes it's really over my blue collar head. 🤘🖤

I think in this very case it is much more helpul to use a profiling approach since the pattern is always the same: A group of hominids inhabit a certain area. They develope into a own group, maybe start building shelters, hunt in groups, learn to control fire, develope some tool use etc. The particular hominin group gets discovered by homo sapiens and 'disappears'.

Super sweet. Thanks for the update, Erika!

Saw this like a week or so ago and ive been waiting specifically for your take on it!

Incredibly interesting, your so articulate and sweet. I’m an old granny in the uk who just subscribed , hugs 😊❤

Thanks Erika! Always great to have a vid from you to break up my work day!

Thanks! Great video; it is an exciting development. I can tell you put a lot of effort into these 21 minutes for our benefit. Thanks!

How the whole human species came to be pretty much us today is astonishing. She says it just right when she talks about the mystery of the whole thing. It has never stopped being astonishing.

Love your content erudite & fascinating!

Thanks to a creationist upbringing. I missed out on learning much about human evolution until i found your channel. It seems that our ancestors were super speedy in evolving, had a lot of variety, and split into many branches compared to other mammals in a similar timeframe. Is this the case?

You are spitting pleistocene fire! I nearly threw my stool