Are Neanderthals Really Extinct?

Neanderthals fascinate us: so much like us, yet not quite us. We have long known that they overlapped with modern humans in prehistoric Europe, but recent genetic evidence suggests widespread interbreeding of the two groups.

Neanderthals were smart. A 2013 study suggests that since a bone associated with speech in humans looks very similar to those of Neanderthals, they may have had complex language. A cache of fossils in northern Iraq made it look like they buried their dead, and there’s also convincing evidence that Neanderthals were the world’s first artists, painting cave walls in northern Spain. In many ways they are very similar to modern humans and yet we classify them as a separate species. Neanderthals had larger brains than modern humans do, and a new study of a Neanderthal child’s skeleton now suggests this is because their brains spent more time growing. Modern humans are known for having unusually large brains for their size. It takes a lot of energy to develop such large brains, and previous research suggested that the high cost of modern-human brain development was a key reason why human growth, in general, is slow compared with that of other primates.

African migrants had sex with Neanderthals about 100,000 years ago and produced fertile offspring. All non-African humans have neanderthal DNA ranging from 1% to 12% therefore are Neanderthals really extinct? Did black people move out of Africa and become white or did they in fact become white by interbreeding with Neanderthals? I propose that modern non-African humans are actually Afro-Neanderthal hybrids.

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