by SCOTT ARMSTRONG ELIAS
A fossilised jaw bone of one of Europe’s earliest modern human, discovered in a cave in Romania, has unveiled fresh evidence about what Neanderthals and humans got up to some 40,000 years ago. Geneticists have found that the individual had between 8 per cent and 11 per cent of its genome derived from Neanderthals – which is far more than any other modern human skeleton sequenced so far.
In the past decade, the analysis of ancient DNA from fossil skeletons of anatomically modern humans has revealed a startling fact: some of our direct ancestors had sex with Neanderthals, producing fertile offspring. Prior to these genetic revelations, anthropological researchers were divided between those who firmly believed that such unions either did not occur, or that they could not have yielded sexually fertile offspring, because the differences between early modern humans and Neanderthal genomes would have been too great.
A well-known modern example of this kind of cross-breeding is that between a horse and a donkey, which yields a sterile offspring (the mule).
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