Neandertals have been making the headlines recently. Good for them. There was also a rather interesting, although not necessarily linguistically totally valid, article in October’s BBC Focus magazine on Neandertals’ language abilities.

In any case, recent discoveries made in Romania suggest that homo neandertalis and homo sapiens may have interbred. Here is a related National Geographic article.

But then again, so apparently were mine. A study making the news rounds at the moment (see for example the comprehensible FOXNews.com article) claims that, based on mathematics and advanced migration modelling, it was sometime between just 2,000 and 5,000 years ago that a person lived who is the ancestor of all present-day humans. Moreover, according to the same study, we only need to go between 5,000 and 7,000 years back and everyone living today has exactly the same set of ancestors.