Are there any other historical figures like Gengis Khan on whom similar work’s been done?
The one that I’d like to see is Alexander the Great. Again, we don’t know exactly where he’s buried; we assume it’s somewhere in Baghdad, but we haven’t recovered the body. Yet we know that he was this major historical figure, and he traveled all over and had multiple wives and probably sired children. And just to find a trace of him or his armies would be great. We haven’t found it yet, but we’re still looking. Did humans and Neanderthals ever live side-by-side? They did, we believe, because we see evidence of Neanderthal remains at 30,000 years ago, and we know that modern humans were in Europe by around 35,000 years ago, so there must have been some overlap. There was certainly temporal overlap, and we believe that they probably did know about each other and encounter each other’s material culture. There is no evidence, though, for any interbreeding in the genes of people alive today. Modern Europeans seem to have come out of Africa with everybody else, and they didn’t descend from
