The fact that paleoanthropologists commonly refer to the Neanderthals as “archaic” humans, owing to their primitive features, could lead to the semantic trap of regarding living humans with greater inputs of DNA from ancient interbreeding as somehow less “evolved” than the rest of humanity. In reality, given that most human DNA shares recent African origins, all living humans should be considered equally “modern.”
但这类杂交的DNA残留对真实世界的影响不应该曲解。古人类学家因其原始特征一致地将尼安德特人称为“古代”人，这一事实可能导致语义陷阱——将带有更多杂交祖先DNA的活着的人种视为“进化”不全者。在现实中，由于大部分人类DNA都有着共同的晚近非洲起源，因此所有的活着的人类可以视为同等“现代”。