https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-we-know-about-the-lives-of-neanderthal-women https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-we-know-about-the-lives-of-ne... This quote is from

https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-we-know-about-the-lives-of-neanderthal-women https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-we-know-about-the-lives-of-ne... This quote is from way down in the article but I think the most significant one: > Most intriguingly, something of the dynamics is visible. In some earlier instances, Neanderthal women had the children of H sapiens men, but the later interbreeding after 60,000 years ago tells a different story. Nobody today has mitochondrial DNA like that in Neanderthals and, since it’s passed only maternally, this implies that interbreeding was more often between their men and our women. Some other interesting ones: > unlike other primates, Neanderthal body size doesn’t seem to have differed much between the sexes. It’s much more similar to most H sapiens populations, which suggests that violent male competition was not the dominant social structure. Instead, more likely something akin to the bonobos, whose adult lives are based around long-term female friendships, might have been possible. > Somewhere around 40,000 years ago, the many generations of Neanderthal women become invisible, at least in skeletal terms. The processes underlying this must have come in many guises, in many places, but one thing we know is that women of another kind – H sapiens – played some part, because Neanderthals were not entirely extinguished. Just 10 years ago, the first nuclear genome was meticulously reconstructed from three genetically identified females at Vindija; it revealed that, rather than ousting Neanderthals from Eurasia, we had in fact interbred with them.