Riiiight.
Because it’s so fun and easy to interbreed species.
Neanderthal were either people or critters, not some half n half thing.
Good point, I was taught in biology long ago that only members of the same species can produce fertile offspring. Two species may be able to produce offspring called hybrids but there is no third generation, the mule is the classic example, there are stories of mules giving birth to live offspring but if it happened there apparently was never a fourth generation. To say that Neanderthals passed down genes to the present day is to say that Neanderthals did not “interbreed with modern humans” it is to say that Neanderthals WERE modern humans, otherwise the offspring would have been infertile hybrids and no genes would have been passed down to the present. Nobody seems to have any desire to get the story straight these days.