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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

There are people with Neanderthal genes, so it cannot be true, that they all died out.

Maybe some European fairy-tales have much deeper roots in history than we think? Perhaps the original sleeping beauty was a Neanderthal lady kidnapped as a bride while in torpor, by an invading Sapiens group. Things like that happening back in the ice age could help explain both the remnants of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes and provide an foundation to the folk tale.

The ancestors of pretty much all Europeans could only have come in contact with the Neanderthals in the Middle East so there probably was too much movement and mixing etc. for something like that to survive.

However it’s hypothesized that during the neolithic farmers immigrating from Anatolia/etc. lived alongside the hunter gatherer communities for quite a while. The types of environments preferred by hunter gatherers didn’t have the soil suitable for early agriculture.

But there probably was still quite a but of friction and violence. Also both groups were very different phenotypically, Western Europeans had very dark/black skin and often blue eyes while the middle eastern immigrants had pale skin and dark eyes.

That mixing of Sapien and Neanderthal genes, which survives in the modern population, occurred in the Middle East, in the Caucus mountains, and in modern day Turkey. But of the Sapien DNA that we have from Europe before 30,000 BC, we cannot find any trace of it in the modern population.

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