Scientists are certain that our modern human ancestors interbred with Neanderthals, suggesting that the species didn't go extinct so much as blend in.

We're all a little bit Neanderthal . That other species was human — we're all member of the genus Homo — but they didn't have the same physical characteristics as what we'd call a modern human.

According to a new study published Monday in Nature , modern humans and Neanderthals may have been interbreeding in Europe as recently as 40,000 years ago.

DNA taken from a 40,000-year-old modern human jawbone from the cave Peștera cu Oase in Romania reveals that this man had a Neanderthal ancestor as recently as four to six generations back. (Svante Pääbo/Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

Perhaps this doesn't strike you as an accurate description of Homo sapiens. If not, you haven't been reading the latest news about Humans and Neanderthals .

Cooperation always prevails, not only when one group of humans encounter a different group of humans, but also when humans encounter a non-human species. Not only are humans unselfish and generous, but they are infinitely clever, which has allowed them to dominate all life on Earth. All the other species, past and present, can only be grateful for the rise of their benevolent human overlords.

Humans are a notoriously friendly and benevolent species. Altruistic, good-natured, compassionate, caring—these are the characteristics which define Homo sapiens. Cooperation, not competition, is the hallmark of our species.

The new study examined the skeletal remains of a man who lived about 40,000 years ago and found that he'd had a Neanderthal ancestor just a few generations back. Dubbed Oase 1, the man had more Neanderthal DNA than any modern human ever examined — between 6 and 10 percent compared with the 3 percent average today — and the Neanderthal DNA segments he had were long, indicating that they came from an ancestor just four generations back or so. That adds weight to the idea that humans and Neanderthals actually co-existed for quite some time, and that our traces of Neanderthal DNA aren't the result of a few sexual encounters — but rather a long-term mingling of the species... Until now, the only real evidence of human and Neanderthal mixing came from populations in the Middle East some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Those are the couplings that led to our own lineage. But the new study shows that a European had recent Neanderthal contributions to his DNA in addition to those early fragments from African couplings, indicating that humans and Neanderthals lived together in Europe, too. That makes sense, since recent studies have argued that humans and Neanderthals lived in the same parts of Europe for some 5,000 years, and that Neanderthals were much more "modern" than we give them credit for — creating art and jewelry, for example. So it would be surprising if the two species had avoided each other on the European continent.

Yes, knowing how humans typically behave, that would be surprising

It seems that the individual studied in the new paper wasn't part of a branch that would lead to the humans alive today — his descendants died out. That could very well be due to the interbreeding itself: Perhaps, as is the case with most hybrids, the interspecies offspring were prone to infertility and disease. But even though this group didn't make it, we now know they existed. “This is the only interbreeding in Europe that we know about so far,” Svante Pääbo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and lead author of the study, told the Guardian. “It shows us that the very earliest modern humans that came to Europe really mixed with the local Neanderthals here. It’s not just something that happened early on when they came out of Africa.”

Early modern humans in Europe "really mixed" with the "local" Neanderthals they came across. We might reasonably ask what "mixed" means in this context. And now there are "exciting questions" to answer.

Now that the intermingling is all the more certain, there are some exciting questions to answer. What was the cultural exchange between these two species like? What was life like for the child of a human and a Neanderthal? We used to think that modern man had violently expunged the Neanderthal from the planet — or at least outcompeted his cousins using superior intellect.

But if humans and Neanderthals had centuries to get to know each other, then the story of our success and their failure becomes much more interesting.

Hmm... I believe I'll stick with the "violently expunged" theory. That's also the way Elizabeth Kolbert is leaning. She uses the word "rape" in her New Yorker post. That word had come to mind to me, too. You know, kill the men, enslave the women!

The finding that the products of human-Neanderthal romance (or, just as likely, rape) had fertility problems is not surprising: many hybrid creatures have trouble reproducing... It had been comforting to think that the Neanderthals were inferior to modern humans—less clever or dexterous or communicative—and that that’s why they’re no longer around. It turns out, though, that the depiction of Neanderthals as hairy, club-wielding brutes—popular ever since the first Neanderthal bones were discovered, in the eighteen-fifties—says more about us than it does about them. With each new discovery, the distance between them and us seems to narrow. Probably they are no longer here precisely because we are. And that only makes the likeness more disquieting.

Disquieting. I live with that vague but uncomfortable feeling everyday. I guess we'll have to wait for "science" to tell us what happened when love blossomed in Romania some 40,000 years ago.

On the other hand, maybe paleoanthropologists and science journalists should get out of the house more often (video below).

After all, history is always written by the winners, and there are no Neanderthals to tell the story of their "failure" and our "success"

&

Instead of wiping out the Neanderthals, we mated with them...