When ancient humans interbred, new research shows that the pairings were predominantly male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens.

Perhaps human females found Neanderthal males to be high-status providers. Or perhaps Neanderthal society was “patrilocal” — meaning women moved to join the man’s family — while human society was the opposite. If human women were more likely to wander into Neanderthal camps and stay there, their genes would show up exactly where Platt found them.

The study, published in Science, was motivated by a curious observation—the X chromosome in modern humans has a minimal amount of Neanderthal DNA.

A complex picture of how Neanderthals died out, and the role that modern humans played in their disappearance, is emerging.

A reconstruction of a Neanderthal man (right) based on skull found at the La Ferrassie rock shelter in Dordogne Valley, France. He's face to face with a male Homo sapien. If you've ever seen what a Neanderthal is supposed to have looked like, it might be ...

A near-perfectly preserved ancient human fossil known as the Harbin cranium sits in the Geoscience Museum in Hebei GEO University. The largest of known Homo skulls, scientists now say this skull represents a newly discovered human species named Homo longi ...

The old man of La Chapelle Discovered in 1908, the skeleton of ""the old man of La Chapelle"" was the first relatively complete skeleton of a Neanderthal individual that scientists had ever found. Buried in the limestone bedrock of a small cave near La ...