Free trade may have finished off Neanderthals

Originally posted by Nygdan
I dunno, those strong cheek bones, high forhead and prominent chin are sketchy, but the adams apple might be what IDs 'er as a neanderthal!
Ha, sorry, couldn't resist.

Neanderthals are NOT the ancestors of homo sapiens.
Homo erectus is, however. Homo neanderthalis is simply a cousin of homo sapiens. There's some slight evidence of interbreeding, as Nygdan said, but the language differences and culture differences might have made too great a gap to make one group attractive to another.

They certainly might have adopted and raised children of h. sapiens, though (and vice-versa, thought h sapiens seems a bit late to develop things like social responsibility.)

Originally posted by Byrd

Originally posted by Nygdan
I dunno, those strong cheek bones, high forhead and prominent chin are sketchy, but the adams apple might be what IDs 'er as a neanderthal!
Ha, sorry, couldn't resist.

Neanderthals are NOT the ancestors of homo sapiens.

Agreed. I think we've demonstrated that Ann Coutler isn't even human!

There's some slight evidence of interbreeding, as Nygdan said, but the language differences and culture differences might have made too great a gap to make one group attractive to another.

I think that the spanish remains might not even be a hybrid, they can be interpreted as such of course, but they're not definitively so. I think that, the apparent lack of neanderthal mitochondrial DNA goes a long way to saying that they didn't interbreed. Then again, neanderthal men could just've been breeding with sapiens women in that case, since mtDNA is maternally inhereted.