Would you do it with a Neanderthal? I mean, maybe, if he looked like this and knew his way around a Linux box.
By now it's pretty obvious that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis were hot for each other. The two groups of early humans were not separate species—they were kissing cousins, separated by just a few hundred thousand years of evolution. Now we know they started hooking up far earlier than scientists believed was possible.
The standard narrative about how modern humans met Neanderthals is pretty simple. A group of early humans, possibly Homo erectus, hiked out of Africa over 600,000 years ago and settled all over Europe and the Middle East. Over time, they evolved into Neanderthals, Denisovans, and probably several other groups. Meanwhile, back in Africa, the common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens was busily evolving into—you guessed it—Homo sapiens sapiens. Around 70 thousand years ago, modern humans started streaming in huge numbers out of Africa, into Europe and the Middle East, possibly spurred on by chilly weather caused by the Toba eruption in Indonesia. There, they met up with their long-lost cousins and immediately started humping.
Genetic analysis has confirmed that said humping took place. Seems like that should be the end of the story, except that even during the Pleistocene, relationships were complicated.
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