DID ANATOMICALLY modern humans interbreed with Neanderthals, the muscle-bound, big-browed and possibly mute cave dwellers who disappeared from Europe and the Middle East about 30,000 years ago? The answer may be less interesting than the fact that so many Homo sapiens are fixated on the question.

The debate about whether there’s a Neanderthal skeleton in our collective closet was revived last week when two groups of scientists reported that they had deciphered DNA from the thigh bone of a Neanderthal man who lived in Croatia 38,000 years ago. From their analysis of genetic material in the bone, the scientists estimated that Neanderthals and the modern people who supplanted them had 99.5% of their genes in common.

This will come as an unpleasant surprise to anyone who remembers the film “Clan of the Cave Bear,” in which a comely Cro-Magnon played by Daryl Hannah was adopted into a clan of brutish Neanderthals. But it will cheer anthropologists who argue that if you gave a Neanderthal a bath, a haircut and an iPod, he would blend in with any contemporary crowd.

Since the discovery in the 19th century of Neanderthal remains in Germany’s Neander Valley, scientific opinion has seesawed between the idea that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end only distantly related to modern humans and the view that at least some Neanderthals felt the urge to merge with smarter, nimbler modern humans who left Africa about 100,000 years ago. Unfortunately, the new revelations about Neanderthal DNA don’t settle the question.


A 99.5% genetic overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals might seem to suggest recent, um, intimacy. Yet humans and chimpanzees are almost as closely related, sharing an estimated 96% of their genomes despite the fact that their last shared ancestor is thought to have lived millions of years ago. Scientists said last week that human and Neanderthal ancestors also began to diverge about 500,000 years ago. Yet at least one leading advocate of the possibility of human-Neanderthal hybrids said the new information was “unequivocal evidence” of “interbreeding.”

Did they or didn’t they? It will take more than a few DNA printouts to dispel the hope (or is it the fear?) that survivors of the “Clan of the Cave Bear” walk among us.