Boy it so tempting to come up with "just so" stories to explain this. And so frustrating that we will probably never be able to determine the answer. but still cool.
Before anyone jaunts too far down the road of literal survivorship bias, I'd like to point out that it'd be incredibly premature—or perhaps way too late—to speculate much on the social side of things.
Elsewhere I've seen some people making hay about exactly whose-males were with whose-females, and want to point out that it's normal for genes to cause asymmetries.
In particular, consider the modern problem of RH incompatibility [0], where one pairing is more likely to end up with a child than an identical but gender-bent one.
Presumably this hypothesis is meant to explain why there is this observed asymmetry in the type of Neanderthal DNA we find in modern human populations that contain them, which is entirely autosomal. With none in the mitochondrial form, which is exclusively passed down along the female line, and also none in the Y-chromosome form, which is exclusively passed down along the male line.
Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”, an alternative mechanism that could explain why we only see Neanderthal autosomal DNA in modern humans could be that only the female offspring of male-Neanderthal and female-sapiens pairings were reproductively fertile. This is more commonly the case in interspecies hybrids, see Haldane’s rule.
I always wondered if Neanderthals disappeared or if they melted in the general human population since it was quite possible their numbers were much smaller than Homo Sapiens.
If we all seem to have neanderthal DNA in us, then we're all the progeny of someone which, to a degree, preferred certain "cross-pollination" behaviours.
Certainly, there would have been no revulsion. And potentially, there would have been preference. So if so, well.. why wouldn't that preference continue in the line?
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 39.4 ms ] threadElsewhere I've seen some people making hay about exactly whose-males were with whose-females, and want to point out that it's normal for genes to cause asymmetries.
In particular, consider the modern problem of RH incompatibility [0], where one pairing is more likely to end up with a child than an identical but gender-bent one.
[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21053-rh-fact...
Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”, an alternative mechanism that could explain why we only see Neanderthal autosomal DNA in modern humans could be that only the female offspring of male-Neanderthal and female-sapiens pairings were reproductively fertile. This is more commonly the case in interspecies hybrids, see Haldane’s rule.
If we all seem to have neanderthal DNA in us, then we're all the progeny of someone which, to a degree, preferred certain "cross-pollination" behaviours.
Certainly, there would have been no revulsion. And potentially, there would have been preference. So if so, well.. why wouldn't that preference continue in the line?