Did modern humans interbreed with Neanderthals and, if so, did the mating result in a half-human, half-Neanderthal hybrid?
This 29,000 year old skull belonged to a hominid with slightly heavier eyebrows than an average person. But this is not enough to convince anthropologists it's evidence of a human-Neanderthal hybrid
The answer is possibly 'yes' to the interbreeding but 'no' to the hybrid, according to the authors of a new study that is already making waves among anthropologists.
At the centre of the study, published online in the
Journal of Human Evolution, and the current debate, is a 29,000 year old Romanian skull that is one of the oldest fossils in Europe with modern human features
But those features aren't quite a perfect match with us, which has led some experts to suspect it was a cross between a Neanderthal and a modern human
That's not so, according to study leader Dr Katerina Harvati
"It differs from living people
within the range of modern human variation,"
clipped from: www.abc.net.au 