Unless you have some really old video or diaries, you don't know this. You know that their tools and means of attaining food are very similar if not the same. What you don't know is if their social norms are the same.
You're getting very hot that I'm attacking your ideas as untrue. I'm not. I'm saying that alough they may be true, there are so many variables and exceptions that it is a troubled argument not likely to win over people.
My point is that it is likely that the differences between humans and neanderthals were likely much greater and more severe than any diffences in living human communities. Therefore, why hang your hat on the weaker argument?
Indeed, it is far from known whether any interbreeding was even scientifically possible.
I'd be happy to agree with you if you are limiting your argument to, "Because humans show a tendancy to exclude outsiders, deformed, etc. from the breeding pool, it is possible that much more severe differences in ability, aesthetics, diet, etc. could completely eliminate interbreeding." But then I've already said that, although probably not in the posts directly to you.
And human intermixing (between tribes/clans) in pre-urban cultures is so rare and fleeting as to be all but nonexistent.
And what could the possible evidence for this be? You are saying that each band of hunter gatherers were genetically pure unto themselves, breaking up, but never coming together. This would even exclude rape and conquest of the women, which occurred a lot for sure later on. So why would urbanization bring this about if humans were incapable of breeding outside of their clans before? Mind you, you're making a "100% of the time" statement here, as it relates to Neanderthals.
See my post #142.
When a conquerer rapes a woman and she bears the child and raises it the child is in the conquered community. The two communities get mixed, but over in the conquered community.
If a Cro-Magnon raped a Neanderthal and she had a child over in the Neanderthal community that is irrelevant to the issue at hand. Because the Neanderthal communities all eventually went extinct, so any intermixed genes also went extinct.
So, in order for the the genes to persist, it would have to be a Neanderthal that raped a Cro-Magnon woman, and then the woman would have to return to the Cro-Magnon community and birth a product of that rape and also raise the product of that rape.
This is all presumed for the simple reason that we do not find evidence of mixed communities. If we did, then this whole debate would be moot...
PS. The phrase "rare and fleeting" is not a "100% of the time" statement.
Also, I am hardly limiting my argument to this. I have presented several different arguments on several different levels. This just happens to be the one that has produced the most extended discussion. I'm not even sure what you're arguing with me about. I think your problem is with my statement that modern humans have a sex of aesthetics and don't usually go out of their way to have sex with butt ugly people. If I'm correct, what you're saying is that humans 30,000 years ago might not have had the same aesthetic, and might've loved ravishing Neanderthals.
That's all fine and good, but in order to get the Neanderthal genes up here to the modern human gene pool what you need is human *women* having sex with Neanderthal men. So maybe the problem here is that you're thinking only in terms of human men, some proportion of which will put it in just about anything when push comes to shove.
I meant a "sense of aesthetics" not a "sex of aesthetics" LOL