Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female's reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are "white." Consider James Cook's voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. "Cook's men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges," archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. "God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn't stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets."Your author notes:Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how "strange" they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.
But the evidence just isn't there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least "Neanderthalish" among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a "Neandermod" lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant.
In contrast, Neanderthals had a short, stocky build like that of present-day inhabitants of cold regions (Pearson, 2000b: 240-241).
That strikes me funny in light of the reconstructed skeleton shown in this thread. I suspect something like "short, stocky build like that of an ape" would be a bit more like it.
I don't have all the answers on this one, but there are several thing I'd try to keep in mind. One is that Shreeve's article is well researched. If there was any crossbreeding between moderns and neanderthals at all which is doubtfull, there was a hell of a lot less of it than you'd expect. That in combination with the DNA studies pretty much rules out modern man descending from neanderthals and most scientists agree with that. The "shazaam" transition from neanderthal to modern does not rule out a possibly long period of coexistence afterwards. The images from Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, as I noted above, sort of point that way. Gunnar Heinsohn is on solid ground in his claims regarding stratigraphy. That combined with other analyses of dating methods in general throw a lot of doubt on many of the time frames you read about involving neanderthals. Finally, there is the question of Elaine Morgan's thesis and what if any implications that might have for neanderthals versus modern man.
The full Neanderthal type...around 60,000 years ago.
Perhaps the reason that the "full Neanderthal type" is more extreme than the ones from 90,000 year ago is a result of the great Toba eruption around 74,000 years ago. Scientists have recently suggested that human population was reduced to as few as 5 or 10,000 individuals as a result of the several years of "nuclear winter" that would have resulted when this monstor exploded leaving a crater measuring 18 miles by 65 miles. In contrast, Pinitubo left a crater 3 miles in diameter, and you may remember the 500 year flood we had in the Mississippi among other severe weather phenomena.
The isolated pockets of Neanderthal that survived, might have had the heavier, more "brutish" bodies that would have survived such severe conditions. This would then have remained is the "standard" body type. Meanwhile, our kind which survived in the warmer climate of Africa would have been quite different, with far less need for a heavy build.