...is the misleading title of this newspaper article (it places Neanderthals as the outcasts).
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_medical/story.jsp?story=492123Did Neanderthals breed with humans?
By Steve Connor, Science Editor, in Seattle
17 February 2004
Fossilised human faeces tens of thousands of years old are helping scientists answer one of the most intriguing questions in anthropology: did early humans interbreed with the Neanderthals?
Researchers are sifting through the detritus of two Stone-Age cave sites in Israel to find samples of human excrement that could be analysed for DNA and point to signs that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans had children together.
The thick-set Neanderthals seem to have almost disappeared by the time that the first modern humans - Cro-Magnons - arrived in Europe and the Middle East some 50,000 years ago. But there has been intense speculation about whether the Neanderthals died out completely or left some hybrid descendants.
Henrik Poinar, of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, said that a project to analyse the genetic material of human coprolites - fossilised stools - could help to solve the mystery by looking for hybrid Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal DNA from the same individual. Dr Poinar said: "I take Cro-Magnon DNA and probe for Neanderthal DNA. If they interbred, and the [DNA] is from Neanderthal, I'll pick it up as obvious interbreeding."
Palaeontologists know from bones and artefacts that the Israeli caves were inhabited almost certainly at the same time by Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, so it is an obvious place to look for signs of interbreeding, Dr Poiner said. "When you take sediments from a cave ... the majority are faeces that have just been trampled in over time," he said.
