This is kind of the best-case fantasy of what happened to introduce that DNA so let's just hope it's true for now.
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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Yeahhh.... first thought I had when the DNA news hit was that this had pretty rapey vibes...
I don't think there was a lot of consent on offer.
I thought neanderthal males were thought to be a lot less aggressive than homo sapiens (possibly even the reason for their extinction)? Even though I suspect you could be right. I think it's possibly a mistake to apply how we are today to how our relatives were 40,000+ years ago. Also they might not have a comparable concept of rape if you go back far enough. So the personal trama, cultural implications, and psychological impact are possibly hard to analyze from a modern lense.
Gotta need a time machine for that ~~sweet neanderthal pussy~~ interesting anthroplogic research.
Sex doesn’t look very consensual for like 99.9% of other species…
Fairly certain even the idea of consent is part of what makes us human.
1: Neanderthals are also humans for the purpose you're discussing, the results of higher cognitive functions. The label is actually applied to all hominins by anthropologists (note the nin and not nid)
2: A lot of tribal cultures have historically had more female autonomy than women in industrialized or preindustrial cultures. There's a lot of discussion about why that is exactly but this image of women as caveman chattel is just a lie
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Where do Neanderthal women be??
Damn, that's incredibly fascinating. And illuminating. Thanks for sharing!
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans
I recommend also using the Pubpeer extension on your browser for topics like this for more context as were still building a fuzzy picture.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pubpeer/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pubpeer/fmcdfigcdfkdghdklblbbpacikcchbbh?hl=en&pli=1
Replace with Neanderthal
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A trend that continues to this day tbh
Neanderthals were more peaceful than Homo Sapiens.
We don't actually know that. Homo Sapiens is on the whole a peaceful species, but we have a few assholes that like to kill and subjugate.
Just because our assholes outlived their assholes, doesn't mean that they were any less assholes on average than we are/were
hunter gatherers vs agriculturers say otherways. Mass of graves and the murdering entire family lines and clans and villages go back as far as humankind goes back. Homo sapiens are no different than any other animal—opportunistic killers like cows and horses are.
Yep, the relative lack of heterogeneity in the Y-chromosome compared to mtDNA is somewhat testament to that too, but those mass grave sites are late stone age. Neanderthals predate those sites by a large margin, so it'd be hard to say that they didn't necessarily follow the same brutal history against their own kin
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As a modern male, cannot confirm
How do we know it wasn't the other way around?
a paper came out recently. it's also possible that male humans and female neanderthals made non viable babies.
There is a few different potential reasons as well as sexual preference.
Genetic incompatibility - the interspecific cross could only occur one way.
Genetic bottlenecks in the neandertal lineage. A high inbred coefficient could have decreased the neandertal females overall fertility (high deleterious alleles load). This could also cause a rapid reduction in the percentage of neandertal DNA in a mixed population.
Maternal behavior - Neandertals females might not have cared for hybrid offspring appropriately. This could be for anything from milk production requirements to differences in physiological developmental rates.
I think the idea of there being health issues in certain types of mixed families is super interesting because that almost certainly would have been noticed and lead to certain cultural practices or taboos within both species' societies.
If I had to guess the successful crosses were potentially much healthier than either parent line. Heterosis (hybrid vigor) would likely be pretty extreme in genetic lines that has been isolated by 300,000+ years of time. Of course the degree of fertility was likely lowered due to genetic distance. Once the initial cross was made however, back-crossing to either species by the hybrid would likely be much easier.
Many of those ancient stories about individuals with super strength and size etc could have likely been based upon these crosses.
The evidence is showing neadertals never truly died out. Their smaller population bred back into the modern humans who came later.
Keep in mind heterosis isn't always the result of hybridization and even then the magnitude of isolation doesn't always positively correlate. Outbreeding depression can also be the result, increasingly so when two groups are more genetically distant or when one group is already subject to heavy inbreeding depression, as the neanderthals were thought to be.
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This is a fantastic thread, I love this meme sub
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So, how likely is it that neanderthals and humans just lived in tribes together, and neanderthals just eventually died off within human tribes?
I bet it at least ended that way.
They died out during the last ice age when one of the big differences from previous ones they survived was the presence of homo sapiens.
I'm guessing it was from a combination of lack of space, raids, and integration (willing or not).
We (who carry it) have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, but it's not the same DNA for all of us, it's pretty diverse, so cross breeding events between us weren't limited to just a few times.
Iirc, there's speculation that neanderthals needed something like 3000 calories per day just to sustain themselves.
We may have just survived because we can go leaner.
One difference that I'm aware of is we were using bone needles at that point to make more advanced clothing, which would have helped in an ice age.
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I'm something of a Neanderthal myself.
Er... I mean... Unga bunga?
Context?
Human genome contains significant contribution from Neanderthals. Because of the location of the neanderthal genes in our genome it can only have come from male Neanderthals.
Unga bunga bang bang
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I thought this was referencing modern dating at first 🙄
Clan of the cave bear vibes
The first one was engaging but subsequent novels really felt like Auel was writing them with one hand
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