Not entirely on topic, but if you really want to put some panties in a wad check this out:
Scientists mapping Neanderthal DNA and comparing it to the modern human genome are looking for evidence of interbreeding between the species, which coexisted in Europe for thousands of years before Neanderthals disappeared.
(Cliffs Notes version for the lazy:
So far the evidence points to those Neanderthals and early modern humans getting it on rarely if at all, but they aren't anywhere near done yet)
Researchers Probe Links Between Modern Humans and Neanderthals
Did Neanderthals Interbreed With Homo-Sapiens?: Neanderthal Fossil Raises Questions about Human Origins
Of course, a few Neanderthal genes would explain some people around here!
I wonder if the evidence doesn't instead point to the rarity of inter-species 'play time' resulting in spawn. Ask any vice squad cop... man is not known to be universally picky about where he puts his pecker.
To me the 'proof' that human is human and race is merely a decoration scheme is the fact that a 'pure' sample of any given race has no problem producing babies with a 'pure' of another race. We're all pink on the inside.
The quality of one's
race is far different from that of
species. Of course different races may interbreed, they are still of the same species, and just produced by having been bred differently. Consider the different breeds of canines which have been bred in only a few thousands of years with characteristics as different as the Chihuahua and the Great Dane. Neither of these appears to be much like the wolf from which they may have so recently descended. H. Neanderthal and H. Sapiens are at the very least different sub-species.
Interbreeding must have taken place. A strong possibility for a scenario would have been rape in either direction of isolated females of outcasts, or small family groups in which a female was taken hostage, or kept as a slave and then raped. Rape and slavery have always been "spoils" of whatever magnitude of war.
This kind of forced interbreeding would certainly have taken place, and in some instances would've produced offspring. Assuming Sapiens and Neandertals were as different species-wise as horses and donkeys, then any offspring produced would've been hybrid, and would've been unable to reproduce without some sort of "advanced" medical/scientific intervention.
The Neanderthal, like the wooly rhinocerous, wooly mammoth, cave lion and other creatures evolved to fit into ice age conditions were at a disadvantage and unable to adapt to the coming end of the last ice age. When that ended they were unable to compete; Competition rules.
A thought experiment suggests that as Neanderthal population levels declined their clan groupings would've grown smaller and smaller in size, finally ending up as individual "loners" scattered around the European continent.
An excellent fictional work in regard to this scenario was a book by William Golding titled
The Inheritors, (he also authored
Lord of the Flies a more well know piece of work) Written in 1955, he had the Neandertals living in a more primitive condition than we now know they lived. It was a very poetic and moving work.
Here’s one page from “The Inheritors”
“The green drifts twitched together and the people on the island disappeared. Lok ran up and down along the river-bank under the dead tree with its nest of ivy. He was so close to the water that he thrust chunks of earth out that went splash into the current.
“Liku! Liku!”
The bushes twitched again. Lok steadied by the tree and gazed. A head and a chest faced him, half-hidden. There were white bone things behind the leaves and hair. The man had white bone things above his eyes and under the mouth so that his face was longer than a face should be. The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle. Lok peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone things over the face. Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again.
The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice.
“Clop!”
His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat. This twig had a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the bone and sticky brown stuff hung in the crooks. His nose examined this stuff and did no like it. He smelled along the shaft of the twig. The leaves on the twig were red feathers and reminded him of goose. He was lost in a generalized astonishment and excitement. He shouted at the green drifts across the glittering water and heard Liku crying out in answer but could not catch the words. They were cut off suddenly as though someone had clapped a hand over her mouth.”
More about the Novel: “This novel is set at the dawn of human existence, during a prehistoric time. A tribe of Neanderthals, living a peaceful, primitive life, is doomed with the arrival of Homo sapiens, a new, weapon-using race who demonstrate their war skills by killing Neanderthals. Golding called this his favorite book, and it was also a favorite of the critics, who saw it as a logical extension of ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ”
This novel, written in 1955, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983
The Inheritors by William Golding
