How A One Night Stand In The Ice Age Affects Us All Today

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal man in a modern suit, at the Neanderthal Museum. Einsamer Schütze via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Over the past half decade, ancient DNA research has revealed some surprising aspects to our evolutionary history during the past 50,000 years.

Perhaps the most startling of these has been the extent to which the ancestors of living people across the planet interbred with other closely related species of human.

But where in the world did these cross-species matings occur? Which archaic species were involved?