Did our ancestors who departed Africa for Europe and Asia interbreed with Neandertals, our sister species from some tens of thousands of years ago?
There’s a surprising amount of evidence that we have, and many of us retain this in the makeup of our genes.
Neandertals were not the stupid, brutish beings of stereotypical caveman myth, but a species which seems simply to have had the historically contingent misfortune to be overcome by us, perhaps by our own prolific breeding, perhaps by some other means.
In this talk, geneticist Svante Pääbo presents the findings of an enormous, worldwide study that shows some Neandertal genes survive in a lot of peeps to the present day.
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