The entire point of sexual selection is that it can happen quickly, on recently split lineages.
I actually agree that there’s no evidence or argument excluding a sexually-selected pre-Neanderthal split, but I’m basically citing what informed people like Alexander thought here.
As an aside, if you work on this topic, I’m old now but I’d really recommend getting into the study of what’s actually moved the needle on subjects like this recently, which is large scale genomic data analysis.
The entire point of sexual selection is that it can happen quickly, on recently split lineages.
I actually agree that there’s no evidence or argument excluding a sexually-selected pre-Neanderthal split, but I’m basically citing what informed people like Alexander thought here.
As an aside, if you work on this topic, I’m old now but I’d really recommend getting into the study of what’s actually moved the needle on subjects like this recently, which is large scale genomic data analysis.