Admit it - you totally would have had sex with Neandertals  Now
that we know for certain that early Homo sapiens had babies with
Homo neandertalensis, it's time to get real about what it was
probably like when those two groups of early humans met in
Europe. Homo sapiens had just trudged up out of Africa, and
Neandertals had been living in Europe for hundreds of thousands
of years. But they were still the same species, capable of
forming families together - and of sharing cultural knowledge,
too.  Svante Paabo, whose lab at the Max Planck Institute was
responsible for sequencing the Neanderthal genome, recently
discovered that DNA from these barrel-chested people is still
present in many Europeans today. In a recent lecture, Paabo
joked about all the mail he'd received since announcing his
discovery. A lot of it was from men claiming that they believed
they were Neandertal throwbacks who should be studied. The women
who wrote him rarely claimed to be Neandertals, but often
offered up their husbands for study.