Neanderthals "Had Sex" With Modern Man

According to Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Neanderthals and modern humans had sex across the species barrier. The professor has been using DNA retrieved from fossils to piece together the entire Neanderthal genome, and plans on publishing his findings soon. He recently told a conference that he was sure the two species had had sex, but still had questions as to how "productive" the relations had been. "What I'm really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?" he said. "I'm sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite rigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence." What remains a mystery is what Paleolithic brewery provided the catalyst for these stone age hook-ups.

Comments

Re:Scientific?

[rcamans]

Actually science does not have any test that will indicate that two critters will or will not breed successfully, within the same genus. There have been successful matings between South American and other cats, for example. SA cats have 36 chromosomes, other cats all have 38. but mating does produce kittens, although most are sterile (with 37 chromosomes). So fairly large variations in chromosomes does not bar breeding. So if Humans and Neanderthals turn out to be the same genus and just different species, then they could conceivably have breed. In reality, the successful breeding is the only current test which exists which says two critters are of the same genus. It used to be that the definition of species was that two different species could not interbreed, but that is not true.