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Human evolution was shaped by interbreeding
- swagv 11y agoI learned this a couple years ago. I'm not sure what's new about it now.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoIf they interbred successfully, doesn't that make them all part of the same species? Or are there is there a great area there?
- Turing_Machine 11y agoIt's not that simple. Suppose you have a group of animals spread across a large continent. The ones on the eastern side can breed successfully with the ones in the center. The ones on the western side can also breed successfully with the ones in the center. The ones on the eastern side are different enough from the ones on the west that they can't breed successfully. How many species are there? :-) It's a continuum, not a binary relation. It's very similar to the way that in historic times you could travel the Germanic or Romance language areas of Europe and the people in one village could always understand the people in the next village, but after a couple of hundred miles the languages would be mutually incomprehensible (this is not nearly as prominent today due to the rise of strong national governments enforcing "standard" languages through schools). There are a lot of other issues involved, too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem for some discussion.