@freeschool right, I was talking about the concept of deep time, as described in the Wiki article. The reason for running them together as one word is simply that there's no way to tag phrases as far as I know.

The origin of the post was a conversation I was having elsenet about why modern #humans show evidence of #maternal #inheritance from #Neanderthals via #mitochondrial #DNA, but no evidence of #paternal inheritance via the Y #chromosome.

Their explanation was basically "our ancestors killed all the men and took all the women." Which is possible, of course: there are certainly plenty of examples of that in recorded human #history. But I have hard time believing it's the *only* thing that happened between two species (or subspecies: the line is fuzzy) that interacted with each over over tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years.

Another and IMO more likely explanation is that #hybrid #fertility is sex-linked. e.g. the rare #fertile #mules are always female. If the same applied in this case, that would explain why the #Neanderthal Y chromosome disappeared in mixed #human populations.

There are definitely applications to modern behavior. 🙂 But really, I'd mainly just like people to get away from always assuming the bloodiest possible explanation for observed #biological phenomena, whether in humans or any other animal.