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You’d think that, outside the wilder fringes of women’s erotica, banging Neanderthals is not a topic of much interest. Just to show that there’s nothing you can’t get a scientific grant for, there is in fact a considerable amount of scholarship on, uh, “relations” between modern humans and Neanderthals.
Now, I know your minds have gone there, so what was being Taken by the Neanderthal (yes, that’s a real book) really like? You might be surprised at how much we can surmise – thanks, science!
Their eyes met across the rugged mountain landscape of prehistoric Romania.
He was a Neanderthal, and stark naked apart from a fur cape. He had good posture and pale skin, perhaps reddened slightly with sunburn. Around one of his thick, muscular biceps he wore bracelet of eagle-talons. She was an early modern human, clad in an animal-skin coat with a wolf-fur trim. She had dark skin, long legs, and her hair was worn in braids.
He cleared his throat, looked her up and down, and – in an absurdly high-pitched, nasal voice – deployed his best chat-up line. She stared back blankly. Luckily for him, they didn’t speak the same language. They had an awkward laugh and, well, we can all guess what happened next.
Of course, it could also have been more a case of a bonk on the head with a bone club, before a, ah, bonk elsewhere with another bone entirely. But, while we don’t know exactly how it happened, we know it happened. Quite a lot.
Assuming it was consensual, it may well have started with a kiss. Now, that may seem obvious, but in fact it’s quite unusual for us ape species. While some monkeys and apes exhibit kissing behaviour, it serves very different social functions than human romantic or erotic kissing. But there’s at least some evidence of interspecies kissing between humans and Neanderthals.
Evidence from a Neanderthal cave in Spain shows that they shared a bacteria-like microorganism, Methanobrevibacter oralis, which is still found in modern human mouths. Further analysis suggests that this was possibly due to sharing spit in one way or another, but its prevalence in the cave specimens suggests some kind of sustained exchange, one of which could easily have been kissing.
It wasn’t the only microorganism they were sharing.
One particular variant of the Human Papilloma Virus is found in locations that exactly match the distribution of Neanderthal DNA. This particular strain is also calculated to have observed between 120,000 and 60,000 years ago – right around the time that homo sapiens were coming into contact with Neanderthals.
Based on the way HPV viruses are spread today, [Ville Pimenoff] suspects that the virus wasn’t just transferred to humans once, but on many separate occasions.
“It is very unlikely that it just happened once, because then it would be more probable that transmission would not survive further,” says Pimenoff. “These sexual encounters must have been rather typical in Eurasia, in areas where both human populations were present” […]
Sex with Neanderthals might have left us with a number of other viruses, including an ancient relative of HIV. But there’s no need to feel resentful towards our long-lost relatives, because there’s also evidence that we gave them STDs – including herpes.
Although Neanderthal erotica today is very much a lady thing, the evidence as to who was playing for the other team most often – men or women – is equivocal. So, it’s likely that interspecies flings were an equal opportunity affair.
Conveniently, they likely had well-matched equipment for it.
One way in which human penises are unusual is that they are smooth. Our closest living relatives, common and bonobo chimpanzees – with whom we share around 99 per cent of our DNA – have “penile spines”. These tiny barbs, which are made from the same substance as skin and hair (keratin), are thought to have evolved to clear out the sperm of competing males, or to lightly chafe the female’s vagina and put her off having sex again for a while.
And aren’t you glad that we don’t, girls?
Back in 2013, scientists discovered that the genetic code for penile spines is lacking from Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, just as it is from modern humans, suggesting that it vanished from our collective ancestors at least 800,000 years ago.
So, it would have been smooth boning, all the way.
No wonder they were so hot for it.
[There] is evidence of “strong gene flow” between Neanderthals and early modern humans – they were interbreeding rather a lot.
As old Sister Mary would have warned them, no good will come of it. The Neanderthals mightn’t have gone blind, but they did go extinct. And banging all those sexy homo sapiens was probably at least partly responsible. They rooted themselves out of existence.
As Neanderthal numbers dwindled towards the end of their existence, their Y chromosomes may have gone extinct, and been replaced entirely with our own. This suggests that a substantial number of ancestral human men were having sex with female Neanderthals.
But exactly the same fate befell Neanderthal mitochondria, which are exclusively passed from mothers to their children.
So when early modern human mitochondria were found in Neanderthal remains in 2017, it hinted that our ancestors were also having sex with male Neanderthals.
BBC
Other interesting tidbits about Neanderthal life: households were composed of related men, their partners and children. Women seemed to leave their family home when they found a partner. Women also seemed to have children older than homo sapiens, while men were fathers at a younger age.
So… a bunch of hairy cougars banging those hot young, tall studs with the small foreheads.
Sounds like a pickup bar.
