Nothing is ever quite settled when it comes to ancient hominids, and I doubt there is a single claim in paleoanthropology that can't be used to start an argument.
So I hope there will be people who will argue with Dr. Richard Klein of Stanford, who has made me nostalgic for ancestors he says I never had.
If he is right, contact between modern humans and Neanderthals was fleeting at best, with no interbreeding. There has never been any conclusive evidence that the two species did interbreed, but it has always been a possibility. And just a few years ago, in 1999, scientists in Portugal found the 25,000-year-old skeleton of a boy who seemed to have been a hybrid, the offspring of Homo sapiens (modern humans) and Homo neanderthalensis.