One of the odd aspects of scientific peer review is that, because it's handled anonymously, you sometimes have no idea someone else is working on the same problem or preparing a paper at the same time. That seems to have been the case with a couple of papers that have appeared online over the last couple of days on the subject of what our ancestors may or may not have done with Neanderthals.
Today, a paper was released by PNAS that indicates the evidence produced in favor of interbreeding with Neanderthals is perfectly consistent with a structured population within Africa that would mean our ancestors never mated with them. Perhaps knowing this paper was in the works, however, the group that brought us the Neanderthal genome released a draft of their own work, scheduled for publication in PLoS Genetics, that argues strongly for interbreeding.
And if that wasn't enough, some of the authors of that work went and revised all the dates for our ancestors' splits with gorillas and chimps.
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