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Moreover, even primitive peoples have a sense of aesthetic, and by any sense of human aesthetics I'm aware of Neanderthals must've been butt ugly.

Finally, a child must not be merely born. It must be raised. Most cultures practiced infanticide of 'deficient' infants until relatively modern times. Raising an infant requires a great expenditure. Why on earth would modern humans want to raise a hybrid?

I think the arguments that humans and Neanderthals interbred are rather inane myself. And modern humans don't just "exhibit Neanderthal traits"; heck, modern humans exhibit chimpanzee traits, and even some duck-bill platypus traits. What that reveals is some degree of common ancestry, not human/duckbill interbreeding.

I think your first comment here swerves into something. Without the necessity of determining whether interbreeding was possible: if it could happen, it did happen; whether the offspring of a mixed couple were destroyed or never born, the result is the same. But your comment about the aethetic raises a possibility. If Neanderthal men having seen human women refused to go back to their "ugly" women, Neanderthal men's libidos may have led them to interbreed themselves entirely out of existence. This would also explain why Neanderthals did not migrate elsewhere: They did not want to and leave their supply of good-looking women behind. They could of course obtain human women by force, overpowering them and the smaller human men, but also by trade and by human women's tendency toward big ugly brutes rather than wimpy, intellectual magnon-sexuals, behavior you can still see today and conduct your own thought-experiment.

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