Archaeologica.org

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/s ... 888874.ece

Modern humans and Neanderthals had sex across the species barrier, according to a leading geneticist who is overseeing a project to compare their genomes.

Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will shortly publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils. He aims to compare it with the genomes of modern humans and chimpanzees to work out the ancestry of all three species.

Okay. This should get entertaining when the counterattack is launched.

“It’s possible that Neanderthals and humans were genetically incompatible, so they could have interbred but their children would have been less fertile,” said Stringer.
This phenomenon is seen in many other species such as when lions breed with tigers and horses breed with zebras. “

It sounds like the historical horse/donkey/mule thing.
In theory mules could have offspring.
But it was so rare, that for practical purposes they were considered sterile.

I wonder what kind of probability ratio he comes up with.
I can’t help but think it would take a whole lot of sex to get a “cross breed” that could reproduce.

There is of course an alternative view to cross breeding producing poor off spring, it's called 'hybrid vigour', so I find it rather odd that this alternative is not even mentioned.

Roy.

kbs2244 wrote:I can’t help but think it would take a whole lot of sex to get a “cross breed” that could reproduce.

That's like an absolute guarantee that a "cross breed that could reproduce" would arise, isn't it?

Yep. NO reason to think that Neanderthal "guys" were any different.

...or HN ladies!

OTOH: who knows, maybe HN had morals and a societal structure like the Bonobos...



In that case I would consider HN smarter than HSS.