Humans and Neanderthals never interbred
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtNeanderthals were a separate species that modern humans replaced. They died out and left no descendants.
NowThe draft Neanderthal genome, published in 2010, showed that people with ancestry outside Africa carry roughly 1 to 2% Neanderthal DNA. They are in your family tree.
What actually happened
Svante Pääbo spent decades solving a problem most colleagues considered hopeless: extracting readable DNA from bones tens of thousands of years old without drowning it in contamination from the researchers handling them. In 2010 his team published a draft Neanderthal genome and compared it to living humans.
The signal was unambiguous. Non-African genomes contain Neanderthal segments, meaning interbreeding happened after modern humans left Africa, likely in the Middle East around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Those inherited variants affect immune response, skin and hair, and metabolism, and some influence disease risk today. The same lab then sequenced a finger bone from Denisova Cave and found an entirely unknown human population, the Denisovans, who also contributed DNA to people in Oceania and Asia. Pääbo received the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The replacement model your textbook drew has become a network with interbreeding across it.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2011, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2010 learned the earlier version.