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One of my friends told me that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals had children together when the homo sapiens came to Europe about 50 000 BC.
But is it possible that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals had children together and bore children with mixed genes from both Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals ?
There's a significant body of evidence for this claim. Eg:
an analysis of a first draft of the Neanderthal genome by the same team released in May 2010 indicates interbreeding may have occurred.1,2 Those of us who live outside Africa carry a little Neanderthal DNA in us," said Pääbo, who led the study. "The proportion of Neanderthal-inherited genetic material is about 1 to 4 percent. It is a small but very real proportion of ancestry in non-Africans today," says Dr. David Reich of Harvard Medical School, who worked on the study. This research compared the genome of the Neanderthals to five modern humans from China, France, sub-Saharan Africa, and Papua New Guinea. The finding is that about 1 to 4 percent of the genes of the non-Africans came from Neanderthals, compared to the baseline defined by the two Africans 2.
There is similar evidence of interbreeding with hominins other than Neanderthal too.
