> Just imagine yourself with a sore throat during the chilly, misty, rainy spring season that is all too common in Europe, but you are living in the bushes, and

> Just imagine yourself with a sore throat during the chilly, misty, rainy spring season that is all too common in Europe, but you are living in the bushes, and you are very hungry... Very good point. Add to that the fact that people were in constant movement before agriculture was invented (just a dozen or so thousand years ago!) and would run into very "strange", unknown tribes on their journeys - without having any idea whatsoever of where they came from, what they believe in or how they're likely to behave towards strangers - and I imagine much of the time, given evidence of widespread violence in our past, they would almost always fight each other. When the other tribe was so different like the Neanderthals would have looked, I imagine it was extremely hard not to default to basically trying to exterminate them completely. Perhaps the few cases of breeding between humans and Neanderthals could be explained by young members of the exterminated tribes which the humans took pity on and decided to raise within their own tribes? I wonder if there's any sort of evidence of this sort of thing happening, or something else like actual peaceful coexistence and maybe even trading between the species (again, I would guess that would be extremely unlikely as we even today prefer to trade with those who are at least a little bit like us).