In any case, as far as the human-Neanderthal-admixture-theory people were concerned, the argument was settled. When you were talking about things that had happened more than twenty millennia ago, how could you ask for more solid proof than this? In the popular mind as well, the theory was now a fact, but scientists were still divided. The no-mixing contingent suffered quite a few defectors, but many refused to throw in the towel. The embattled true believers fought on, claiming that the measurements were inconclusive and fragmentary (which they were); the so-called human traits were ambiguous, mere within-species variations. Not all Neanderthals looked alike, not all chimpanzees looked alike, and not all human beings looked alike. The boy was, like his mother, a Neanderthal, pure and simple. A little less chunky than most, maybe, but Neanderthal all the same.

So what was a human woman doing buried in a Neanderthal rock shelter with a Neanderthal child in her arms? Who knew? Maybe she was the original nanny. Captured as a slave, perhaps. Or maybe she was an outcast from her own group who had been accepted into the Neanderthal fold. But then why was she buried with the child? Who could say? But to build from this scanty, questionable evidence, the conclusion that they were human mother and human-Neanderthal offspring? No, they would need a lot more evidence before they accepted that.

In the larger world, however, there was no longer any debate, especially after Who We Are: The Legacy of the First Family, The Learning Channel’s highest-rated series ever, was shown, hosted by Gunderson himself at his urbane, avuncular best. In the popular mind, intergroup mixing between humans and Neanderthals was now a fact. (You couldn’t say “interspecies mixing” anymore, as Gunderson lucidly, if a bit simplistically, explained, because the biological definition of species turned on the idea that only members of the same species could interbreed.) The fight was over.