Report: Modern Man Had Sex With Neanderthals

A leading geneticist has determined that modern man and Neanderthals had sex across the species barrier, according to the Times Online .

Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, recently told a conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York that he was now sure the two species had sex but he was unclear if the couplings had led to children (watch an interview with Prof. Paabo about his theory below).

"What I'm really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?" Paabo told the Times. "I'm sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite rigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence."

Prof. Paabo is seeking to prove his theory by examining Neanderthal fossils for traces of modern man's DNA. He said he will soon publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils, and plans to compare it with the genomes of modern humans and chimpanzees to work out the ancestry of all three species.

The phenomenon has already been seen in modern animals such as horses and zebras, and lions and tigers, but resulting offspring have always been infertile.

Studies in 2003 and 2008 contradict Prof. Paabo's theory. Those studies both claim that DNA from Cro-Magnons -- the first modern Homo sapiens in Europe -- did not contain any evidence that Neanderthals and modern man had sex .