In an expedition through the Central Asian steppe, a group of Kazakh and European archaeologists search for clues left by early Humans and Neanderthals – they are investigating the prehistoric origins of the legendary Silk Road.
Far before its emergence in the 2nd Century BC, and well before the silk trade, this expansive network of routes had already been 50,000 years in the making. Traversing over 2,500 km from the Uzbek to the Russian border, scientists search for traces that may hold the missing key to how extreme climatic events spurred prehistoric mass migrations, bringing an unprecedented encounter between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.
These discoveries will help explain how climate change and geography fueled key genetic exchanges in human evolution, helped shape the structure of modern Asian populations, and later enabled the explosion of culture and trade along these routes. Their findings show how humans coped with inhospitable environments and cemented the nomadic cultures still present in modern-day Kazakhstan.
A short doc by Alba Jaramillo
Produced by Anna Bressanin
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