Did Neanderthals Have an Incest Taboo? What Ancient Genetics Reveals

Did Neanderthals have an incest taboo? The question sounds almost too modern to ask of a species that vanished 40,000 years ago — but the answer, drawn from recent studies of Ice Age DNA, is more interesting than you might expect. Neanderthals lived in communities so small that inbreeding should have been inevitable. Bands of…