I'm tired of this. Last semester I wrote a short essay based on the assumption that modern humans and Neanderthals probably didn't interbreed, as the interpretations of the DNA evidence had claimed at the time. Now scientists are saying otherwise, in a paper (PDF) published in Science.
Honestly, I guess it is rather difficult to believe that a few modern human men, having laid eyes upon some foxy Neanderthal ladies, never banged it out.
A few things:
* Every ethnic group except Africans carries a little bit of Neanderthal DNA.
* Those that do, have at least 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA. That's a pretty huge shift from believing we rarely even mingled.
* We made love in the Middle East 60,000 years ago, right after Neanderthals left Africa and before modern humans started taking over the world.
* We share 99.7% of our DNA, as opposed to 98.8% for us and chimps.
More: John Hawks, the go-to guy for this kind of stuff, blogs it out here but it's hella long.
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