Now that I’m thinking about it I believe “Cave people exploited for the amusement of a 21st Century audience” was also a plot point in The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones.
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The paper is definitely talking about inbreeding, not interbreeding, and the paper doesn’t say that Neanderthals started to decline at the point where they started interbreeding.
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It sounds to me like the evidence suggests modern humans started doing two things when their paths crossed with Neanderthals:
- Killing off Neanderthals (intentionally or otherwise)
- Interbreeding with Neanderthals
So it makes total sense that Neanderthal DNA started to show declining genetic diversity at around the same time it became mingled with our own.
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My wifes got some, as it turns out.
Yes, I agree, evidence suggests this. The paper reinforces that the two groups interbred and the breeding population of Neanderthals was small. But the evidence in the paper does not say that one caused the other.
The Boing Boing headline is wrong, Homo Sapiens didn’t interbreed Neanderthals to extinction. That is not what the paper is saying.
The more times I read the headline, the more ludicrous it is.
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Poor Ringo, he went from 4th place among the Beatles (still a respectable showing) to being a Neaderthal poster boy for Boing Boing.
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with no disrespect to Ludicrous intended
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Zug-Zug
It’s more ethical to clone someone and then put them in charge of an evil organization. You can’t tell me a resurrected and vengeful Neanderthal wouldn’t be a great supervillain with the right backing.
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you beat me to punchline! 
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“Sir, the exhibits have escaped!”
“Yes. ‘Escaped’.”
It´s true. All Europeans and Asians are actually hybrids of Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis. The only “pure breed” Homo Sapiens are black Africans. Something white racists like to conviently ignore.
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No, they are saying the blood types of different human (sub)species were incompatible so many mixed children would have their red blood cells attacked by antibodies from their mother, resulting in hemolytic disease of the newborn. Think rhesus babies.
This means when these human populations mixed most genetic material from the Neanderthals would die out because it would also come with the high risk of dying from hemolysis.
So modern humans outperformed Neanderthals in many ways and when the few remaining Neanderthals bred with the modern humans most of their offspring died.
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Pretty sure that those Homo sapiens are also an amalgamation of various closely related subspecies. Africa is a big continent, large enough for specification.
Exactly. (Well, not quite. We fucked them and the resulting offspring were fucked. We fucked them to extinction, would be more accurate, setting aside all the comments that note that this is not actually what the paper is saying.)
Not dead from the neck down at least.
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