Confirmed? Early humans and Neanderthals interbred!

Somebody got some spainin to do! But according to a recent IO9 article:

• Part of the X chromosome found in people from outside Africa originally comes from our Neanderthal cousins.

This reversal of positions from Neanderthals and more "modern" homo-sapiens at the time come from research done at the Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal.

Neanderthals left Africa around 400,000 to 800,000 years ago and went extinct 30,000 years ago. Homo-Sapiens left Africa 80,000 to 50,000 years ago. This would give the two races at least 20 thousand years of overlap.

Now anyone reading so far is thinking....that doesn't prove anything or if anything such a short period is more than likely to lean towards no intermingling at all. But Dr LaBuda has additional evidence to bolster his case.

Again from the article:

• (During the last decade LaBuda) and his team had identified a piece of DNA in the human X chromosome that seemed out of place (possibly) from a non-human source.

Of course their suspicions were confirmed with the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010. 6,000 chromosomes were examined from donors of all major and minor population densities. All with the exception of populations from sub-Saharan Africa, had corresponding parts of the Neanderthal sequenced DNA, even widely separated populations in places like Australia.

IO9 article
This article links to Molecular Biology and Evolution which has even more fascinating information.