100,000-year-old Neanderthal footprints show children playing in the sand

[admin]

Fossilized footprints on a beach in Spain were made about 100,000 years ago by a family of Neanderthals, including children who jumped about as if playing in the sand.

100,000-year-old Neanderthal footprints show children playing in the sand : Read more

 

[Snorrie]

Neanderthals were in Europe 100,000+ years ago. Modern humans, H. Sapiens Sapiens, arrived in Europe approx. 80K years ago, by approx. 30K years ago H. Sapiens Neanderthalensis went extinct. Neanderthal and Sapiens were sub-species and interbred. Yet 70% of Neanderthal genes are distributed within today's populations of humans. What events, trends, diseases, life styles, etc. effected Neanderthals to most likely push them to extinction while our sub-species did not suffer the same fate? Any comments, feed-back, references would be appreciated. I recently viewed the PBS documentary "Neanderthal" on Kanopy.com. I can not see any reason(s) why we survived as a unique species versus a hybrid species.

 

[SHaines]

I feel like the amount of shared genes would mean we did survive as a hybrid, of sorts. Our species had enough similarities to co-exist and interbreed so our two genetic lines had already started to combine before whatever specific events removed Neanderthals from the landscape.

It is all incredibly interesting though. I hadn't heard of Kanopy before, so I checked it out (in case it was spam) but it actually looks like it might be a cool resource. I haven't had a chance to really explore the content, but I will.