>Also, it was pointed out that Neanderthals existed for 250,000 years;
>nothing to sneeze at. Homo sapiens have only been around so far for
>30,000. What seemed particularly interesting was that, so far, DNA
>testing has not identified Neanderthal in our population. However, there
>were remains of a 4 year old skeleton from thousands of years after
>Neanderthal extinction that appeared to be a hybrid - Cro-magnon facies
>but Neanderthal body.

Just had to respond to this, as an anthropology professor:

1.  Homo sapiens have been around for much longer than 30,000 years.  There
is disagreement about how to name and classify specific fossils, because,
after all, they don't come with name tags.  None the less, the general
agreement is that Homo sapiens first appears around 300,000 years ago,
evolving out of Homo erectus ancestors in Africa, Asia, and Europe.
Neanderthals *are* Homo sapiens.  They are usually classified as Homo
sapiens neanderthalensis, a difference at the subspecies level from modern
humans, who are Homo sapiens sapiens.  Homo sapiens sapiens, depending on
your perspective, have been around for anywhere from 200,000 to about 40,000
years ago.

2.  DNA testing to compare Neanderthals and modern humans is not very
useful, since there are very few genes separating the two subspecies.  It's
all relative.  We (modern humans) are 98.4% identical to modern chimpanzees.
  All humans share many genes in common (way more than 98.4%, obviously) and
we also shared these with Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.  So it is perfectly
possible for Neanderthals to have contributed lots of genes to modern human
populations.  The best analogy we have to the supposed 'contact' between
more modern appearing Homo sapiens sapiens coming out of Africa at
200,000-100,000 years ago and Neanderthals living in Europe at the time, is
the Bantu expansion.  Around 500 BC, a group of Bantu-language-speaking,
dark-skinned, iron-working farmers left their homeland near the
Nigerian-Cameroonian border in Africa and spread to the east and south.  For
1,000 years they continued to expand into regions occuppied by
non-Bantu-language speaking, lighter-skinned, hunters and gatherers, until
they got all the way to the east and southern coasts of Africa at about 1500
AD.  Along the way, in some places the Bantu killed the local inhabitants,
in others they killed the men but incorporated the women and children into
their own populations, in others they intermarried freely without killing
anyone, and in still others they pushed the local inhabitants out to less
desirable areas.  There is no evidence for whole-sale replacement of the
indigenous populations by the invading populations with no gene contribution
from the people who were already there.  If we apply this to the
Neanderthal/Homo sapiens sapiens encounter, we see that extinction of the
Neanderthals is the *least* likely scenario.  Plus, the fossil evidence and
evidence from modern humans suggests lots of interbreeding with invaders, as
well as simple evolution of Neanderthals into Homo sapiens sapiens.

3.  The 4 year old child is not unique -- there are a number of fossils from
after the supposed date of Neanderthal 'extinction' that have Neanderthal
features, both of the face and of the body.  And as I said before, you have
only to travel to the southeastern parts of Europe and the Middle East to
find people who have the large brow ridges, high root of the nose (defined
by the lay public as 'deep-set eyes'), occipital buns and large noses that
are supposedly unique to Neanderthals.  I recently spoke with a physical
anthropologist who has seen modern human skulls from the Balkans, skulls of
people massacred during the civil wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Herzegovina
during the 1990s -- as he put it "They're clearly Neanderthals!"  Of course,
they are also clearly modern humans, belonging to Homo sapiens sapiens.

End of anthropology lecture for today.

The popularization of the Neanderthal controversy has VASTLY oversimplified
the evidence, which is very complex.  Don't be drawn in by the TV versions
of anthropological research.  I put them right up there with Desmond Morris
"Naked Ape" claptrap, and "The Search for Noah's Ark" and "Chariots of the
Gods."

Kathy Dettwyler

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