In Hidden Depths, Professor Penny Spikins explores how our emotional connections have shaped human ancestry. In this chapter, we synthesize diverse data, theories, and models to reconsider aspects of Neanderthal sexual and reproductive behavior, and contextualize inferences within our current understanding of their physical characteristics, life-ways, and genomics. Of course, some uncertainty will always surround the behaviors of extinct species, but we can be sure that Neanderthals had sex and successfully reproduced for hundreds of thousands of years, and the archeological record and DNA evidence can illuminate behaviors that are invisible anatomically. Similarities in growth and development indicate that, like us, Neanderthals also gave birth to helpless young, and imply complex social lives necessary to support reproduction and protracted phases of offspring development. There is no doubt that the evolutionary forces that shaped Neanderthals and Homo sapiens differed, but recent evidence of interbreeding tells us that our anatomy and physiology were compatible and differences in physical appearance were not an obstacle to social interaction.
Despite a remarkably persistent pop culture image of Neanderthals as semi-upright, hairy, cavemen wielding clubs, science provides us with a different picture.
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