Our brother Neanderthal
For years, conventional wisdom among biologists has been that modern humans and the Neanderthal people evolved along separate branches of the hominid tree and that they did not interbreed. Now a set of researchers has presented evidence that this theory of human evolution was all wrong , that in fact there was interbreeding. Their research on the Neanderthal genome, about 60 percent of which has been recovered, indicates that 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of modern non-Africans was derived from the Neanderthals. This does not necessarily indicate a strong and consistent blending of the two strains, but it seems certain that there was some at least intermittent intermingling, even though the Neanderthal influence does not seem to have played a significant role in the evolution of modern humans. Back in the 1980s, writer Jean Auel had something of a literary sensation with her "Earth's Children" series of books. The first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear , introdu...