Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-03-31
Source: The Conversation – France in French (2)– By Ludovic Slimak, Archaeologist and researcher at CNRS, Historical authors The Conversation France; University of Toulouse
A recent article published inSciencehas been widely read as if it revealed a preference of Neanderthal men for womensapiens. This interpretation, appealing to our contemporary imaginations, keeps us in a comfort zone where otherness can still be thought of in terms of desire and attraction. But as soon as chromosomes are reinstated into the thickness of societies, by intersecting genetics, archaeology, and cultural anthropology, another image emerges, more unsettling, touching on something rawer in the human: groups structured by rules of circulation, unequal reciprocities, boundaries, alliances, and perhaps violences whose depth we are only just beginning to measure.
From reading the press headlines, the matter seems settled.El Paísannounces that Neanderthal men“chose”womensapiens.Scienceevokes a“partner preference».National Geographicimagine déjà les“Romeos of prehistory”.The Telegraphimplies that the Neanderthals“had their eyes on”womensapiens.
In a few hours, a statistical analysis became a story of desires. The “sexual life” of our ancestors was finally just a click away. The shift is not insignificant. It transforms an asymmetry of genetic transmission into a story of emotions, attractions, and past romances. A scene is fabricated where the Neanderthal Romeo wins the heart of Juliet.sapiens. The discourse about our origins becomes a photo novel.
However, the study published inSciencedoes not say anything like that. The authors question awell-known pattern. In non-African modern humans, traces of Neanderthal DNA are not evenly distributed and are more frequent in non-sex chromosomes than on the X chromosome, where it is greatly depleted.
To explain this contrast, the authors consider several hypotheses: natural selection, sex-related demographic biases, or partner preference. Their conclusion remains cautious: partner preference is a plausible parsimonious mechanism, but it does not exclude demographic biases or more complex scenarios.
The study therefore shows neither an observed attraction nor a lived preference. It proposes something much narrower: within the range of models it tests, certain scenarios make a male Neanderthal/female type asymmetry more plausible.sapiens. In such a scheme, Neanderthal DNA can be widely transmitted in ordinary chromosomes, while the Neanderthal X chromosome circulates more difficultly, since a father transmits it only to his daughters. This is not insignificant. But it is also not the direct observation of an attraction between populations, and showing that a statistical model can produce a genetic pattern is not proving that this model is historically true.
What the X chromosome does not say about social life
As soon as one moves from genetic data to their historical and social implications, interpretations become fragile. Chromosomes do not transmit the faithful memory of the social life of our ancestors. The fact that Neanderthal DNA is rare on the X chromosome does not, in itself, allow for the reconstruction of social organizations of the Paleolithic nor the sexual preferences of these populations.
When two closely related groups meet, the sex chromosomes do not behave like the others. They are often more sensitive to incompatibilities and natural selection. Let’s take the case of a Neanderthal father and a mothersapiens. Their child does indeed receive Neanderthal DNA in many of their chromosomes. But the father’s X chromosome does not pass to boys, only to girls. Therefore, it circulates less easily from one generation to the next. Moreover, in hybridizations between closely related groups, theMales are often the most biologically fragile, with more survival or fertility problems. That is why the sex chromosomes, and in particular the X chromosome, can lose DNA from the other group more quickly. A depletion of Neanderthal DNA on the X chromosome can thus be explained by a classic biological phenomenon, and not by the memory of a romantic choice.
The signal observed today can therefore have several causes. The authors themselves do not present the “partner preference” as direct proof, but as the most parsimonious explanation in their statistical model. They specify that it neither excludes demographic biases related to sex, nor more complex scenarios where natural selection, differential migrations, and sexual asymmetries would have acted together.
Genetics detects transmissions. It does not reconstruct a society. It does not indicate whether these unions were alliances, captures, asymmetrical exchanges, violence, or choices, nor who decided, nor under what constraints women and men circulated between groups. Between a chromosomal pattern and a life scene, an entire world is still missing—the world of social constructions, rules of residence, hierarchies, conflicts, and asymmetries between collectives.
Genes, despite all their power, do not speak of past loves. They only speak of what has survived.
What El Sidrón changes in the discussion
This is where archaeology and cultural anthropology become crucial again, because genes alone are not enough to reconstruct the social scene of encounters between Neanderthals andSapiens. You then have to leave the only article ofScienceto return to other data and try nevertheless to access, indirectly, the structure of Neanderthal groups. The El Sidrón site, in northern Spain, provides a particularly strong foothold in this regard.
The authors of the study haveidentified bones belonging to at least 12 Neanderthals. The most striking point concerns the adults. Three males carry the same mitochondrial lineage, while three females each present a different lineage. Yet, mitochondrial DNA is only transmitted by mothers. The researchers drew a simple but significant conclusion from this: men would have remained in their group, while women would have moved more between groups. In other words, El Sidrón would be compatible with a patrilocal system.
The idea is decisive. Every human population needs exchanges with the outside to reproduce over time. In many human societies, this circulation is primarily through women, who leave their original group more often than men. More generally, female dispersion and the maintenance of males in their group also constitute a predominant pattern.in great apes. To see in Neanderthals a signal compatible with increased female mobility therefore reflects a deep behavioral tendency, which is found from primates to human societies, and female mobility between groups is here the most plausible explanation for the observed pattern. For once, we thus have a concrete point of support on Neanderthal social organization.
And this deep trend towards female dispersion changes many things because from then on a whole social world becomes conceivable: exchanges of women between groups, asymmetrical integrations, reciprocal or non-reciprocal circulations, alliances, captures, or even harsher forms of intergroup relations. From there, the question is no longer just which chromosome survived, but in what type of society these transmissions took place. And this single possibility already suffices to shift the reading of the paper fromScience, because the observed genetic asymmetry could then pertain to a social world, still unexplored, structured by rules of residence, circulation, and exchange.
“Neanderthal, “Sapiens”: I love you, me neither”
Integrating the constraints of cultural anthropology into biomolecular readings allows for other shifts. In Belgium, the Goyet site yielded the bones of four Neanderthal women and two juveniles. Cut marks are clear on five of them. The demographic profile of this assemblage appears too unusual to reflect ordinary mortality. Isotopic signatures suggest a non-local geographic origin.The authors put forward the hypothesis of cannibalism linked to the conflict, a predation targeting the females of neighboring groups. If this interpretation is correct, it says something brutal. Here, the relationships between Neanderthal groups did not belong to a sentimental world but to capture, killing, and consumption of the other.
The data can indeed be interpreted this way, but this case also calls for caution. The corpus is limited. The excavations are old. Spatial data are lacking. The identity of the local predator group is not directly observed. Once again, the traces do not speak with a single voice.
This is when a reversal becomes possible. If one momentarily leaves the purely biomolecular perspective to return to the social, a patrilocal society profoundly changes the meaning of bodies. Women come from other groups, but in worlds where female mobility is a common pattern, from great apes to human societies, the interpretation of this signal becomes immediately more subtle.
The observation of cannibalism affecting women from neighboring regions can therefore be read simply as predation on foreigners. But it cannot exclude another interpretation, that of an internal, ritualized treatment of women who came from elsewhere but are now fully integrated into the group. Biology and genetics cannot tell us whether an individual born elsewhere remains a foreigner or becomes a full and complete member of my own social world.
Let’s then return to the study ofScience. This is where one needs to be very precise about what it actually demonstrates. The signal of ascendancysapiensmobilized by the authors refers to a very ancient episode, around 250,000 years ago. Their demonstration therefore does not rely on the direct observation of the main admixture that has left its mark on present-day humans. It assumes that the same genetic mechanism would still have been in operation 200,000 years later, at the time of the final contacts betweenSapiensand Neanderthal.
If we consider the very strong tendency for female mobility, a paradox appears and deeply challenges the extrapolation proposed by the articleScience. If womensapiensactually and regularly entered Neanderthal groups, one would expect to see a persistent, recent genetic signal of ancestry in the last Neanderthalssapiens. However, this is not what the available data shows. Among the firstSapiensFormer Eurasian, the Neanderthal heritage is constant. However, the Neanderthal genomes exploited so far do not document any recent contributionsapienswithin the last Neanderthal populations. The genetic flow recognized at the time of contacts therefore operates in a single direction, from Neanderthal toSapiens.
Another anthropological hypothesis then becomes conceivable. In a patrilocal world, the movement of women not only regulates reproduction but also structures alliances between groups. If the exchange ceases to be reciprocal, the entire relationship changes. The formula is harsh, but it expresses this paradox well:
“I take your sister, but I do not give you mine.”
This is not about giving a mechanical description of each crossing, but this formula names a possible structure: that of an unequal relationship between these human groups, or even a lasting social asymmetry between Neanderthal groups andsapiens. It is this link between one-way genetic flow, patrilocality, and non-reciprocity of exchange that had led me, inNaked NeanderthalIn 2022, it is worth noting this singular paradox: “Neanderthal, Sapiens, I love you, me neither.”
Placed back in this context, the meaning of molecular signatures shifts. The asymmetry is no longer read as the fossil trace of a preference, but as one of the possible effects of a structurally unequal relationship between human populations. Adding to this the fact that sex chromosomes eliminate certain genetic contributions more quickly, the picture changes again. What was thought to be read as a story of desire could in fact, more profoundly, stem from asymmetric social structures.
What genes do not know about humans
Projecting our stories of desire, taste, and preference onto the very long history of humanity allows us to stay in our comfort zone. But the confrontation with otherness is always harsher. Our values have no spontaneous universality. They cannot serve as a foundation to think about vanished worlds. The encounters between Neanderthals and Sapiens cannot be reduced either to past loves or to wars simply transposed from our modern imaginations. What researchers attempt to approach are social structures, forms of exchange, boundaries between groups, the quality of alliances, ways of making worlds.
For this, aligning chromosomes or isotopes is not enough. Paleoanthropology must regain its full meaning. It is not only the science of bones but also the ethological, cultural, and social study of past human societies.
The difficulty is therefore not to choose between certain disciplines and others that are fragile, but to learn to make fields of knowledge, each working in their own way on incomplete traces, engage in dialogue.
The real lesson may be here. Chromosomes do not tell us a little love story between populations. They open up to much broader questions. Who enters the group. Under what conditions. According to which rules of circulation. Under what reciprocity or lack thereof. With what violence, sometimes. And above all, with what transformation of the status of individuals.
The body, its skin, its bones, its genes, its isotopes, will never tell us anything about the reality of the individual within a social body. The human is that creature which is not reducible to its matter.
Among humans, the stranger is born only from the look that excludes him.
So yes, the question is indeed a matter of taste. But not necessarily in the way that the mainstream media have understood it. What newspapers have turned into a matter of sentimental preference could actually be something much deeper and, sometimes, in certain forms of cannibalism, much more literal…
The illustrations in this article are taken from the comic stripNeanderthal naked,by Frédéric Bihel and Ludovic Slimak, published byOdile Jacob, 2026.
Ludovic Slimak does not work for, does not advise, does not own shares in, does not receive funds from an organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no affiliation other than his research institution.
–ref. Question of taste: Did Neanderthals really like “sapiens” women? –https://theconversation.com/question-of-taste-did-neanderthals-really-like-sapiens-women-279051