New Study Suggests Neanderthals Died Off By Having Sex with Humans
Sometimes interbreeding just doesn’t work
If you’ve read much of my writing, then you know I’m fascinated by human history. Including our twenty-one prehistoric relatives beyond our own Homo sapiens segment of the human species — eight of which we coexisted with. But it’s the Neanderthals that capture our modern-day imagination the most.
This is largely because we know more about them than any other human species, aside from ourselves, of course. The more we learn, the more we find that Neanderthals weren’t all that different from us. And our relationships weren’t as hostile as previously assumed. Yet, they didn’t survive. Leaving us a curious mystery to solve. Many theories have been suggested over the years, and now a new study suggests another one — that having sex with us is what killed them.
Neanderthal Overview
If you don’t already know, Neanderthals lived from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, mainly throughout Europe and Southwest and Central Asia. While our genetic lines diverged between 650,000 and 500,00 years ago, we shared the planet with them for thousands of years before Neanderthals went extinct. So what happened to them?
