John Hawks has a good little post on this from just a few weeks ago [1]: Anthropologists usually do call Neanderthals “humans”. Ironically, experts differ more

John Hawks has a good little post on this from just a few weeks ago [1]: Anthropologists usually do call Neanderthals “humans”. Ironically, experts differ more from each other about how to define species (and Homo sapiens with it) than on how to define human. Neanderthals did interbreed with the descendants of African early modern humans, and Neanderthals are among the ancestors of people living today. For many, that is enough to recognize that Neanderthals are Homo sapiens. ... What the data do show is that the populations that existed at the time of Neanderthals (and Denisovans) were a lot more different from each other than anybody living now. That makes the current variation of humans, including the idea of race as we usually understand it, a bad model for what was happening at the time these populations lived, more than 50,000 years ago. So we are working to find new ways to talk about these kinds of populations that will be accurate, and not rely upon our understanding of people in the present. His longer post[2] covers more of the rapidly shifting ground in the story of human origins, which is becoming a more fascinating story almost by the day. [1] https://medium.com/@johnhawks/this-is-a-great-question-e69bfef46844 https://medium.com/@johnhawks/this-is-a-great-question-e69bf... [2] https://medium.com/@johnhawks/the-story-of-modern-human-origins-just-got-more-complicated-9e435bea24f6 https://medium.com/@johnhawks/the-story-of-modern-human-orig...