I always thought it was just me ...

Tree-climbing primitive apes weren’t the only prehistoric swingers.

New research suggests that Neanderthals were not too choosey when it came to doing the nasty – routinely having sex romps with one another and possibly two other groups of extinct human progenitors.

The evidence – presented Monday at the Royal Society in London – indicates that Neanderthals mated freely with Denisovans and another as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia, Nature reported.

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, told the magazine.

“Humans whose ancestry originates outside of Africa owe about 2 percent of their genome to Neanderthals; and certain populations living in Oceania, such as Papua New Guineans and Australian Aboriginals, got about 4% of their DNA from interbreeding between their ancestors and Denisovans,” who were named after the cave in Siberia where they were discovered, Nature said.

The Siberian remains were left there between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago.

But no one knows much about the other human ancestral group from Asia, the scientists admitted.

“We don’t have the faintest idea,” said Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the London Natural History Museum, who speculated that the group could be related to Homo heidelbergensis.

That species that departed Africa a half million years ago and evolved into the Neanderthals who later dominated Europe.


http://nypost.com/2013/11/20/neanderthals-had-sex-with-anyone-anything/