Around 140,000 years ago, a Neanderthal and a modern human got it on. We know nothing about the situation that led to this interaction. We don’t know which parent came from which species, but we do know that they had a child who died around the age of five. A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University and the French National Centre for Scientific Research discovered the child’s skeleton in what is being hailed as a “global breakthrough”. Why is it so significant? This is the earliest evidence we have of these two distinct human groups interbreeding. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The skeleton was discovered around 90 years ago in the Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel, in Israel. It is the earliest known human fossil to exhi

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