Last year the magazine Scientific American printed an article ‘Where did all the Neanderthals go?’ (A type of hominid whose remains were discovered in the Neander valley in Germany in 1858) The burden of the article was that they died out due to competition with ‘superior’ hominids - Homo Sapiens – us.

I thought that was wrong and wrote a letter to Sci Am (which wasn’t published – still I’ll bet Shakespeare had the odd rejection).

I apologise to Bryn’s Vicky in advance.

To the Editors Scientific American

The vast bulk of humanity, both in numbers and geographical spread, has dark hair and brown eyes. Any variation on this theme, blonde or red hair and blue or green eyes, is even now most prevalent in the extreme north and west of Europe and before the European diaspora would have been even more concentrated in these regions.

The suggestion that they could be Neanderthal characteristics is not new and is usually dismissed as ' no evidence of interbreeding can be found.' What would constitute evidence? Reports from divorce courts or tabloid newspapers are strangely absent.

If the Neanderthal were a non-aggressive people who retreated before the advancing Sapiens hordes, northern and western Europe is where they would have made their last stand – and last stands usually end in rape and pillage.

An argument against is 'Where did all the other Neanderthal features go?' For instance, beetle brows and large noses.

Blue eyes are a recessive characteristic so for them to be prevalent in a population the gene must have a high frequency. It is difficult to see any survival selection advantage for blue eyes per se, to enable them to spread rapidly through the population. A possibility is the 'peacock tail effect' (or in this case the 'gentlemen prefer blondes effect) - the result of sexual selection.

Sexual selection whilst increasing the prevalence of 'desirable' characteristics, could have helped suppress 'less desirable' ones. Of course Europeans are known as 'big noses' in many other cultures, particularly China, suggesting that the process may be less than complete.

If the genes for the blue eyes etc were single chance mutations in the Sapiens genome then it is difficult to see how they could have spread so rapidly and completely in the 50 000 or so years since modern humans arrived in the extremes of Europe – even by sexual selection.

Recent genetic evidence from Neanderthal remains has identified the red hair gene and a gene associated with speech suggesting that they could communicate and at least had some had unusual hair colouration.

End of letter

Since then the argument changed from, no interbreeding, to a little with the caveat that any resulting offspring would probably be infertile.

But now the most recent gene studies suggest that up to 4% of European DNA is from Neanderthals and that instead of being a separate species they were at least a sub-species quite capable of a productive roll in the hay.  Link here

Perhaps they also had white skins. Any bets?