[Graymatter]

>>The question is whether a human woman would invest her life raising the progeny of a Neandertal man who raped her. I rather doubt it myself.

The question prior to that is whether she and her clan knew that sex causes babies, and moreover, that babies acquire characteristics from fathers. This is obvious to us but not all cave persons grasped it.

[AntiGuv]

Well, that's actually a very excellent point. The reason I assumed they'd know something was out-of-whack with the kid is because it would presumably look deformed.

[AntiGuv]

Of course, a lot of people here seem to claim that deformity wouldn't matter to the Cro-Magnon, even though it sure as heck has mattered in some way to every known human culture. Most of which (a) killed deformed infants; and (b) did not have sex with deformed adults.

[AntiGuv]

It is worth noting BTW that I personally am unaware of any culture in the historical record that did not know of the connection between sex and progeny, and I have looked at the question tangentially in my research into notions of fatherhood. The closest that I can think of was a Native American tribe in the northern Amazon who believed that a child was the progeny of all the men that the woman had sex with.