ieva

Wondering if anyone has or knows anyone selling spare tickets for the Motorhead gig in Glasgow on Saturday night ???

I was having a wee think about this this morning over my bowl of dry Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes (I don't like milk) - did Neanderthals ever cross-breed with modern humans? I realise any answer will be pure conjecture but thought it might be an interesting topic.

Firstly, a disclaimer - it's 15 years since I left uni so any dates/time periods given are probably a lot of pish. Either i've forgotten them or theories have moved on.

The way I remember it is that anatomically modern humans appeared about 200,000 years ago while Neanderthals died out about 30,000 years ago. Hope i'm right.   That being the case, there was a period of 170,000 years that they co-existed. I know that the theory is (was?) that they largely inhabited different environments and their paths probably didn't cross that much. But 170,000 years? There surely must have been some contact. I don't know where main Neanderthal settlements were, apart from the skull(s) found in Germany, and the theory that they were pushed to the margins and perhaps died out in southern Spain (this was on a TV documentary fairly recently). These areas must have been inhabited by modern humans at the same time.

As different species (ie they evolved separately, not directly from us, and were an evolutionary dead end) would they have been biologically capable of interbreeding with us?

Or, not restricting it to just Neanderthals, would any of the early hominids that evolved from the "Out of Africa" 1 migration - related to Homo Erectus - have been able to interbreed with modern humans who came out of Africa later?

Apologies if anyone finds this mind-numbingly boring. I find it fascinating.

tête-à-tête

ETA have to keep those quiet for obvious reasons:

Here is a photo from one ETA day out though...