Opinion: Neanderthal watch

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They’re back.... The current issue of National Geographic magazine cover features Neanderthals, the human-like race who inhabited the Near East and Europe until 25,000 to 30,000 years ago, when they were wiped out either by the elements or by lither Homo sapiens from Africa -- i.e., us. Neanderthals are almost as ubiquitous in the media as the GEICO cavemen, who are at least arguably Neanderthals. (They might be Cro-Magnons, but I have a feeling the ad men who invented them weren’t interested in anthropological taxonomy.)

Alas, the NG article has only a brief reference to the question that excites most of the non-specialist interest in Neanderthals: Did they, um, do it with us? As I have mentioned before, this question is of more than prurient interest; one scientist has theorized that humans got their smarts from canoodling with our beetle-browed cousins.

For years, advocates of the interbreeding hypothesis have pointed to Neanderthal-like features in some modern-day people, like prominent brow ridges, weak chins and a fondness for sleeveless undershirts. But the NG article by Stephen S. Hall mentions the interbreeding hypothesis in the process of debunking it on the basis of DNA evidence.

Hall does include a rebuttal by Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. ‘There were very few people on the landscape, and you need to find a mate and reproduce,’ Trinkaus said. ‘Why not? Humans are not known to be choosy. Sex happens.’

The NG article also suggests that Neanderthals possessed a gene associated with speech, which means that Neanderthal men had no excuse when their human girlfriends complained, ‘We never talk.’