Neanderthals were early Europeans who got wiped out by Africans 35000 years ago

Do you have cousins? I guess I should say "first cousins", since we ALL have cousins. All humans are literally cousins.

Other people that share 2 parents with you are your siblings.
Other people that share 2 grandparents with you are your first cousins.
Other people that share 2 great-grandparents with you are your second cousins.
Other people that share 2 great-great-grandparents with you are your third cousins.

And so on.

Every human has 2 parents, a mother and a father. Therefore, every human has 4 grandparents (2 grandfathers and 2 grandmothers). And every human has 8 great-grandparents... and 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on.

Using genetic models, it can be calculated that almost all living humans are at least 100th cousins. That is to say, our most recent common ancestor only lived about 2500 years ago.

No matter how different you think someone else is, they are LITERALLY your cousin. And not all that distant of a cousin, either. Most of the people living near you, that you would consider complete strangers, are actually your ninth cousins... or even less.

So yes, you have cousins, we all do. You and I are cousins.

Now, consider that all life on Earth - even the snail in your back yard - branched off the same big tree of life. All animals, plants, fungi, and even single-celled life forms are related. If you look closely with a good microscope, you see the same genetic coding (DNA) in everything that's alive on this planet. That's because we're all related if you go back far enough.

That snail in your yard is your cousin. LITERALLY. It's not a figure of speech, or a funny way of thinking about things... it's the literal truth. Sure, mollusks branched off the family line a little further back than you did, but the point remains, we are all literally cousins. Everything that's alive on this planet is part of the same big family. We're all blood relatives.

A major study last year revealed that early homo sapiens arrived in Northern parts of Europe as early as 45,000 years ago. This is noteworthy because we know that Neanderthals were there from about 120,000 years ago until about 35,000 years ago (which is when they went extinct). So we have confirmation that they lived, interacted, and interbred there for thousands of years.

Neanderthals are African humans that moved to Europe and adapted to life there. It's colder and darker in Europe, so these early Europeans developed lighter skin to absorb more Vitamin D from the sun. The Neanderthals had to learn new skills to augment the grassland hunter-gatherer lifestyle that had worked well for so long.

But somewhere around 1500 generations ago, Cro-Magnon people (another African species which migrated out through the Middle East) moved into Northern Europe, and slowly displaced the indigenous population. The fair-skinned Neanderthals eventually became absorbed into the Cro-Magnon African genetics. Over hundreds more generations, their skin again became lighter. Today, modern Europeans are the living humans with the most Neanderthal DNA, somewhere around 4%.

So... Africans moved North and slowly changed into Europeans. A new and different kind of African later immigrated, killing off and breeding with the first wave. The same kind of thing has been happening in the Middle East and Asia for about the same length of time. It has been happening in the Americas and other distant parts of the globe in more recent epochs. This is just human history. It's how we've evolved, spread around, mixed, and remixed. We started in Africa, left in waves, evolved in our new environments, and mixed with future waves. Some family lines died out, others went on.

Those of us alive today are the survivors. For one reason or another - or for many many reasons, more likely - we're here right now.

And we're all cousins.

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DRutter