How are modern humans and Neanderthals related?
There is great debate about how we are related to Neanderthals, close hominid relatives who coexisted with our species from more than 100,000 years ago to about 28,000 years ago. Some data suggest that when anatomically modern humans dispersed into areas beyond Africa, they did so in small bands, across many different regions. As they did so, according to this hypothesis, humans merged with and interbred with Neanderthals, meaning that there is a little Neanderthal in all modern Europeans. Scientific opinion based on other sets of data, however, suggests that the movement of anatomically modern humans out of Africa happened on a larger scale. These movements by the much more culturally and technologically advanced modern humans, the hypothesis states, would have been difficult for the Neanderthals to accommodate; the modern humans would have out-competed the Neanderthals for resources and driven them to extinction.
