Humans Hooked Up with Neanderthals
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on May 1st, 2010 4:53 am by HL
Humans Hooked Up with Neanderthals
Humans today could be part Neanderthal, according to a new study that found our ancestors interbred with an extinct hominid species some millennia ago. Neanderthals walked the Earth between about 130,000 and 30,000 years ago. While they co-existed with modern humans for a while, eventually they went extinct and we didn’t. There has been intense scientific debate over how similar the two species were, and whether they might have mated with each other. A new study found evidence for interbreeding between modern humans and some other extinct ancient human species — either Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) or another group such as Homo heidelbergensis. One period of interbreeding probably occurred shortly after Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago.