Ancient teeth suggest Neanderthals and Homo sapiens got it on more than a few times
The teeth had been discovered over a century ago, but researchers are now seeing them in a new light.
Ancient teeth gathered a century ago hint at a hybrid population of Neanderthals and modern humans on the islands between France and Britain. This adds to existing evidence that the two groups interbred multiple times across history.
Some of the Neanderthal teeth recovered from La Cotte de St Brelade. Image credits: Compton et al (2021),
Journal of Human Evolution.
What you can learn from teeth
Neanderthals emerged some 400,000 years ago, coming to dominate a vast swath stretching from Western Europe to deep Siberia. They were a bit shorter and stockier than Homo sapiens, but otherwise, the two are very similar. Anthropologists have increasingly shown that Neanderthals weren’t the brutes they were once believed to be: they were every bit as smart and cunning as Homo sapiens.