Thus The Guardian today. “Oldest genome sequence of a modern human suggests Homo sapiens first bred with Neanderthals fifty- to sixty-thousand years ago,” elaborates the newspaper. The leg bone in question was found by chance on the bank of a Siberian river. Svante Pääbo and Janet Kelso at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig dated it at around forty-five-thousand years ago. The genetic material found in the bone showed that the man carried about two percent of Neanderthal genes. This is about the same percentage as that among modern humans with the exception of Africans. Working backwards, Pääbo and Kelso calculated that the man’s genetic ancestry goes back another seven- to thirteen-thousand years. This would mean that humans interbred with Neanderthals soon after departure from Africa. That would place the departure around sixty-thousand years ago. But the research also shows that humans did not interbreed with Neanderthals after that early date. This the article misses entirely. Early love between the two sub-species did not last long, that is. And it ended in annihilation of Neanderthals not long afterwards, most likely by our ancestors. Homo sapiens, ha-ha.