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Which brings up the question: Did the Neanderthals interbreed with ancestors of modern man? I have no doubt that attempts were made, and there may have been viable offspring. These half-breeds may even have eventually bred true, which would make modern man maybe not so modern after all. Certainly some seeming throwbacks continue to appear even in the best of families.

And who knows? The crossbreeds may well have been major improvements over either of the parent stocks.

I'd like some studies done on DNA of early modern humans and modern humans to see how much they diverge. The discrepancy might equal that observed between modern man and the Neanderthal specimens.

I think we are the same species and interbreeding could have produced and probably did produce, viable offspring.

Which brings up the question: Did the Neanderthals interbreed with ancestors of modern man? I have no doubt that attempts were made, and there may have been viable offspring. These half-breeds may even have eventually bred true, which would make modern man maybe not so modern after all. Certainly some seeming throwbacks continue to appear even in the best of families.

I think it highly likely that some interbreeding occurred. The problem with anthropologists is that they tend to see evolutionary progression as a one-dimensional thing, i.e., X led to Y which led to Z and so on. For X, Y, and Z they have only the particular species that have been discovered, not the plethora of transitional forms in between, which may have numbered in the hundreds and consisted of types whose differences were so minute as to be undetectable. The same thing applies to history. There's a tendency to see everything moving in a linear progression with no interaction or branching-out involved. The untrained historian sees, for example, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Hittites, each in its own context, without really understanding that there was continual movement of all these peoples, inside, outside, and upside down, and continual interaction between them.

Which brings up the question: Did the Neanderthals interbreed with ancestors of modern man? I have no doubt that attempts were made, and there may have been viable offspring.

You can find modern men who will screw sheep, goats, and whatever else doesn't run away too fast. I'm sure there were couplings if the two kinds co-existed in the same territory for any length of time