On a forest-choked expanse of land that will one day be called Germany, a herd of bison huddles together to ward off the cold. Hidden in the foliage nearby squats a man. Like the animals he’s hunting, he has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to cope with freezing temperatures. His massive jaw juts out, and his forehead slopes forward to form a heavy brow – providing a thick layer of bone that protects his sinuses and large brain from the icy air. His barrel-shaped body and short limbs help him retain heat. So do the furs he wears and the fires his family builds in the cave where they live.In one hand, he carries an object that represents the height of technology among his people: a knife-edged stone made by a skilled craftsman who strikes one rock with another, 40 or 50 times with absolute precision, flaking off tiny shards until an extremely sharp blade emerges.Technology isn’t enough to fell the bison, though. Gored and trampled, the man dies without bringing dinner home to his family. His people eventually die out, leaving behind only a few bones and fragments of stone. We don’t know why they became extinct or what they called themselves. We know them only by the name our species has given them: Homo neanderthalensis, the Neanderthals.Forty thousand years after the bison hunter went down, a tall, lanky man with disheveled white hair and scuffed hiking shoes is using one of his species’ own state-of-the art tools to pulverize the Neanderthal even further. On a warm spring day in Walnut Creek, California, geneticist Eddy Rubin stands surrounded by huge glass tanks.

Inside, robotic arms move with frenetic precision over plates holding genetic material, reducing the Neanderthal’s remains to tiny strings of nucleotides and producing the world’s first extended sequence of Neanderthal DNA.The data will help pinpoint when humans and Neanderthals diverged on the evolutionary tree and if they bore children together when they met again as separate species. The information may also help answer a profoundly human question: Are we the first and only intelligent species to walk the planet? If it turns out that we do share certain key genes with the Neanderthals, we’ll know more about whether their intellectual capacities matched our own, including whether they might have had a spoken language.

View: Full Article | Source: Wired

i wouldn't be surprised if neanderthals mated with other human ancesters because of the way i've seen some modern humans built. some people look like what i would expect a neanderthal would look like.

We were the same species...Homo spaien sapiens and Homo sapien neanderthalis.

I think the jury is still out on whether we're the same species. The DNA evidence is crucial to pinning that down. We are certainly a very closely related species, but we're also related to chimps. Humans and Neanderthals may have not been able to produce children together ... we still don't know.

Humans and Neanderthals pass the requiring criterion for being the same species...

Look alike
Inhiabit same habitat

The only thing is that we havent been proven to reproduce yet...that will be the defining factor.

do you think one of them in the picture helped build stonehenge?

What makes you think that?

yeah i think i've dated a couple...

No way a Neandethal was involved with Stonehenge -- they were all probably about 25,000 years gone by then. But what an intriguing idea -- I feel a sf short story coming on!

Assuming they have the same number of chromosomes

I think they bred with use untill the two species were completely
one.

Anyone interested in this topic should definitely read THE ICEMAN INHERITANCE, by Michael Bradley... which is a theoretical support (and very racist theory) about WHY Caucasians are so fkd-up. ((anti earth- nuclear development, etcetc.))

I do not necessarily agree with ALL of his premises therein - HOWEVER - most of the book is so leading edge---- and controversial, that it should be more deeply reviewed.

amazon blurb: Michael Bradley delves back into our glacial past during the last Ice Age in order to find the prehistoric sources of the white race's aggression, racism and sexism. Relying on the researches of Alexander Marshack, Carleton Coon, Konrad Lorenz, S.L. Washburn, Ralph Solecki and others, Bradley offers a persuasive argument that the white race, the Neanderthal-Caucasoids, are more aggressive than others because of ancient sexual maladaptation. And, in tracing the effects of Caucasian aggression, Bradley offers an uncomfortable and all-too-plausible explanation for the pattern of human history.

Humans and Neanderthals are very similar species, the Humans evolved for more Tropical climates were as the Neanderthals evolved for the Ice Age climate. When they met im sure there was inter breading how ever I do not think that the Humans and the Neanderthals mated untill there was only one speices left, other wise we would be able to tell through DNA because of the Humans in Asia and Africa would not have mated with the Neanderthals.

~Thanato

I am leaning towards no. While there may be some relation, just like there is some relation to chimps and baboons too, a Neanderthal would be substantially differentiated from a modern human, no matter what race or ethnicity.