interbred

Those first modern humans that had interbred with Neanderthals and lived alongside them died out completely in Europe 40,000 years ago - but not before their offspring had spread further out into the world.

This means Thorin's genome was full of the variants one usually sees with recent inbreeding, a striking feature given other modern humans lived nearby with whom Thorin's Neanderthal community could have interbred.

Between 2009 and 2018, the researchers interbred the butterflies and recorded how traits such as wing shape and the chemical makeup of sex pheromones changed in the resulting offspring.

When Kevin Bacon noted on Instagram that his morning habits are like those of a Neanderthal, he did not stop to explain that our ancient cousins interbred with modern humans expanding out of Africa.

The evidence that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis lived side by side is consistent with genomic evidence that the two species occasionally interbred.