Are you an adventurous human woman? Adventurous enough to be a surrogate mother for the first Neanderthal baby to be born in 30,000 years?

It feels so good to bring that headline back again. We have new developments and origin stories; ice-bound catastrophes averted and mysterious crimson disks identified. For all of these stories we have caves to thank (say thank you to the caves. Go on. Say it).

Life lives! Bears menace! Phone cancer! Asteroid stowaways! Booby bullies! Lab dangers! Electron dancing! Neanderthal crowding! And dangerous health experiments that you can do at home! It's your Thursday Science Watch, where we watch science—on the road, baby!

Italian paleoanthopologist Marco Peresani found a bunch of bird bones in the "Grotto of Smoke," a site known for being "loaded with Neanderthal bones." And he's got a theory: They wore them! As accessories! Fashion!!

Scientists have discovered bits of cooked plants in the teeth of Neanderthals, contradicting the conventional wisdom that they only ate meat, and proving that the hominids hadn't yet developed sophisticated toothpick technology.

Scientists have discovered an entirely new species of ancient human. The Denisovans lived in Central Asia around 40,000 years ago, and we all have some of their DNA from back when they got busy with our own ancestors.

British researchers have concluded that Neanderthals "had a sense of compassion," and didn't just wantonly kill and maim each other as previously thought. Closely examined remains prove that they cared for the sick and disabled. Sounds pretty damn socialist, no?

Scientists working on sequencing the Neanderthal genome have discovered that 1 to 4 percent of most people's DNA is inherited from Neanderthals, proving that even back then most people were sluts who would really just sleep with whoever. [CSM]