Almost every hominin lineage has gone extinct. Neanderthal, Homo erectus, Homo rudolfensis, Homo habilis, Homo floresensis, Homo naledi, the australopithecines… -- they aren’t around anymore. There is just one exception – us. We are hominins, and we are still here, so far. But we had a close call sometime in the prehistoric past; genetic evidence shows that the population of modern humans was once very small. What was it that rescued us from extinction, so that we are now extremely numerous, populating almost every ecological niche on Planet Earth? Was it our own pluck and ingenuity? Or was it a fluke – a happenstance at just the right time (i.e., a miracle?) We’ll look at the “rescue package” that sets us apart from other primates, and perhaps from other hominins. We’ll consider how much we do or don’t resemble Neanderthal, and what their remains are telling us. We’ll examine evidence from Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, including the ~60 genes that all modern humans have and no Neanderthals had, and ask why those genes swept so rapidly through the early modern human population. And we’ll think about how the physical evidence illuminates the way that God breathed his neshamah into a creature formed out of the earth, capable of fulfilling his command to “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”