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PS. The phrase "rare and fleeting" is not a "100% of the time" statement.

But DNA exclsusion is. That's what I was referring to.

My point all along is that of the myriad of reasons to put out against the possibility of ANY interbreeding, the cultural one is the weakest and it is quite reasonable that the reasons were much greater.

Again, if talking about humans, it would be expected that women would get swapped both ways. Certain conjecture and facts concerning Neanderthals could be put forth to assert that this was only one way. Yet you then have to explain what became of the mixed children of the captured Neanderthal women, none of which could have mixed back into the population, if DNA evidence is conclusive.

So I'm going with the idea that a more pronounced difference precluded initial and/or subsequent carrying of the mixed line.

I think we have had a major failure to communicate. I fully agree with your point that the DNA argument is more than strong enough, but my comments have been oriented toward those who reject that argument. My whole point has been that even in the absence of genetic evidence to the contrary I think that the notion of intermixing strains the boundaries of credulity. And I have presented this on several levels.

To answer your issue about wife-swapping humans: They can talk to one another. A comparable analogy here would have to be wife-swapping all the way out of the language group. That simply does not happen willingly in pre-urban societies. Heck, it's almost unheard of even as an unwilling transaction. As I said, it is so extraordinarily rare it borders on nonexistent.

And it barely happens willingly even in ancient post-urban cultures.

And you are also of course ignoring the difficulty that subsistence cultures have in keeping the group fed and alive. Why on earth they would want to pull a Neanderthal woman into the group is a mystery to me.

SampleMan, or anybody else, can you answer this?
The conclusion that we are not related to Neandertals, is it based solely on mtDNA research or has there been another sort of genetic evidence? Because I don't see how mtDNA alone could prove it.