Would you mind giving your source for this quote? I have heard this several times in the last year, but no one has ever been able to point me to a source.
You could take your pick:
http://www.expressindia.com/fe/daily/19970712/19355423.html
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1602/video/Fate.html
http://www.genum.com/gmo_evolution/gmo_evolution.htm
etc. etc. etc.
Discover Magazine did a big article on neanderthals in 96 or so just before the DNA studies came in and the big question they asked was why, given fact that neanderthals and modern humans had lived in close proximity for long periods of time, there were never any signs of cross breeding; it should have been common, and no clear-cut sign of it has ever turned up. the DNA evidence explains it; we could no more interbreed with neanderthals than we could with horses.
Neanderthals emancipated On Neanderthal culture
Molecular Analysis of Neanderthal DNA
BBC NEWS SCI/TECH >DNA clues to Neanderthals
Neanderthal DNA A creationist's website
Neanderthal DNA Soup A fun read unless your religion is orthodox Evolutionary Theory.
"The DNA mapping of a few specimens relying upon mitochondrial DNA is not conclusive evidence that Neanderthals did not contribute genes to modern humans."
Author/s: Robert Kunzig
Issue: August, 1999
Does the 25,000-year-old body of a child found in Portugal make it more likely that they are our ancestors?
What you want, when you hold a pendant fashioned 35,000 years ago by a Neanderthal--a fox's tooth with a tiny hole for a leather string--what you want is something only the movies can give. A close-up, in the lab's neon light, on the mottled canine between your fingers, the focus so tight you can see the scratches made by the stone tool. The picture fades, and next you see the same tooth in different hands, stronger ones with beefy fingers: the hands of the craftsman. He is piercing the tooth with a sharpened piece of flint. Behind him squats a rough tent of hides stretched over mammoth tusks; behind that the dark mouth of a cave. Before and below him a river meanders lazily between birches and willows. Reindeer graze on the far bank. On an early morning in spring, in northern Burgundy during the Ice Age, the light coming in low over the far bluff catches the craftsman's pale, weathered face. It is a human face. The eyes, under the jutting brow, are human eyes, alive with concentration, with memories of other seasons at this place, with intelligence and hope.
No, hold it: Maybe those Neanderthal eyes are blank as a cat's, all surface, with nothing behind them but dumb instinct and a bit of animal cunning--no memories, no plan, no clue.
Back to spring 1999 and the lab, at a modern campus of the University of Paris. An archeologist named Dominique Baffler holds the tooth. For the past few days newspapers the world over have been reporting the discovery in Portugal of the skeleton of a 4-year-old child, dead for 25,000 years. The discoverers, led by Portuguese archeologist Joao Zilhao, are making a ground-breaking claim, that the skeleton shows traces of both Neanderthal and modern human ancestry; evidence that modern humans did not simply extinguish the Neanderthals, as many researchers had come to think. Instead the two kinds of human were so alike that in Portugal, at least, they intermingled--and made love--for thousands of years.
The claim is controversial. So, too, and for similar reasons, is the fox tooth Baffler is holding. A collection of such ornaments is arrayed on the table in front of her, along with delicate bone tools--awls for punching through animals hides, needles for sewing or perhaps for pinning up hair. All these artifacts were dug from the mouth of a limestone cave four decades ago at Arcy-sur-Cure, a hundred miles southeast of Paris. Just in the past year, though, the Arcy artifacts have become the subject of heated debate. Zilhao, Baffler, and several French colleagues claim the artifacts show that Neanderthals were not inferior to our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons. Independently; they underwent the same leap into modernity, the same emergence of symbolic thought that millennia later allowed Cro-Magnons to paint on cave walls.
A fox-tooth pendant is not a cave painting, as Baffler well knows, for she studies those paintings too. But it is a symbolic statement. "Oh, it's beautiful," she says quietly; turning the Neanderthal pendant in her fingers, peering at it over her glasses. "It's beautiful and it's moving. A 35,000-year-old bijou--isn't that moving?"