““You’ve probably heard a good deal about Neanderthal [Nee-AND-er-tall] people or almost-people. Sometime around 500,000 years ago, the ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans diverged. It’s a difficult business making inferences about ancient people from the limited remains available, often just a few fragments of bones and teeth. When I was in school, it was believed that the Neanderthal people were completely different from our kind of people. This is to say, it was believed that they and we were entirely different species and never mingled with each other, much less … um … got intimate. Now the evidence shows that our ancestors and Neanderthals not only were alive at the same time, but apparently they interacted. They may have traded with each other, but that’s not all they did. Groundbreaking genetic work by Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo and others shows that the two kinds of protohumans had sex with each other.””