I was just pondering the possibility that Neanderthal man could have been the Ogres of lore referred

to by ancient Britton and older authors. Could the fear and loathing of these creatures aided in their extinction?

It seems more than coincidence that both Ogres and Neanderthals prefered caves much as a stone bridge would appear to be cave. It seems as though the overlap in timelines between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals might support this idea.The physical description from early Britton writings are not very far off in similairity. An archaeologist would probably have a better take on this than anyone. If the subject has been written about please share any information that may be at hand. Any other ideas out there?

…..and here it is fresh from Wikipedia:

However, an analysis of a first draft of the Neanderthal genome by the same team released in May 2010 indicates that interbreeding did occur.[4][5] "Those of us who live outside Africa carry a little Neanderthal DNA in us," said Pääbo, who led the study. "The proportion of Neanderthal-inherited genetic material is about 1 to 4 percent. It is a small but very real proportion of ancestry in non-Africans today," says Dr. David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who worked on the study. This research compared the genome of the Neanderthals to five modern humans from China, France, sub-Saharan Africa, and Papua New Guinea. The finding is that about 1 to 4 percent of the genes of the non-Africans came from Neanderthals, compared to the baseline defined by the two Africans. This indicates a gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans, i.e., interbreeding between the two populations. Since the three non-African genomes show a similar proportion of Neanderthal sequences, the interbreeding must have occurred early in the migration of modern humans out of Africa, perhaps in the Middle East. No evidence for gene flow in the direction from modern humans to Neanderthals was found. The latter result would not be unexpected if contact occurred between a small colonizing population of modern humans and a much larger resident population of Neanderthals. A very limited amount of interbreeding could explain the findings, if it occurred early enough in the colonization process.[4]

While interbreeding is viewed as the most parsimonious interpretation of the genetic discoveries, the authors point out that they cannot conclusively rule out an alternative scenario, in which the source population of non-African modern humans was already more closely related to Neanderthals than other Africans were, due to ancient genetic divisions within Africa.[4]

Among the genes shown to differ between present-day humans and Neanderthals were RPTN, SPAG17, CAN15, TTF1 and PCD16.[4]

Have a Neanderthal Ogerish Day! /laugh.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />