Monday, September 20, 2004

Caveful of Clues about Early Humans.

Possible evidence of interbreeding between modern humans and the Neanderthals from Romania.

It would be nice if there would have been interbreeding between modern humans and the Neanderthals. It´s certain that the Neanderthals didn´t leave any recognizable genetic inheritance to the populations living now where they once lived, so either the interbreeding was quite limited or the hybrids didn´t leave descendants. Purely on emotional grounds it would be nice that Neanderthals would have modern descendants; the species are no more, but the extinction wouldn´t be 100%. Not quite. 99,999% or something like that.

Most likely, if there was interbreeding, few of the hybrids survived to produce offspring of their own, if any did. One question is of course how the two populations would have viewed these hybrids? Would they have been accepted in either one of them?