When I’m handling a 350,000-year-old hand-axe at the British Museum, which was made by one of the ancestors of the Neanderthals, a Homo heidelbergensis (or if you prefer an early Neanderthal – not all the experts use that terminology), two questions (possibly inter-related) come up: did we kill them off? did we interbreed with them?
Having just read John Hawks excellent Neanderthal genome FAQ I’m going to have to amend my answer to the second question. (Which was: “the current evidence says we didn’t”. It will now be “there’s some limited, early evidence that we might have done.”)
I was using the mitochondrial DNA evidence outlined here, but seems that isn’t now thought to be enough – because mitochondrial DNA is only a small part of the story.
That second link also has a simpler outline of the debate, if you’re finding John Hawks hard going…
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