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Can someone who knows more about anthropology explain to me what makes Neanderthals their own species and not just a separate race?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pedrosorio 5y ago
The answer is that species is a fuzzy concept defined a long time ago: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-neanderthals-same-species-as-us.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-neanderthals-same-species... https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Homo-sapiens-and-Neanderthals-considered-to-be-separate-species https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Homo-sapiens-and-Neanderthals-...
- daveslash 5y ago
  Stack Exchange Biology is another good Q&A resource that has an answer. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/39664/how-could-humans-have-interbred-with-neanderthals-if-were-a-different-species https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/39664/how-could-...
nicklecompte 5y ago
The short answer is that it is far from a settled question - many people say “Homo sapiens neanderthalis” as the proposed subspecies. The fact that modern humans and Neanderthals crossbred and apparently had viable offspring is strong evidence for this understanding (but not necessarily conclusive; sometimes mules are fertile). That said, Neanderthals rapidly went extinct after modern human contact, and are vastly genetically different from us compared to any two randomly chosen modern humans. They do not appear to have formed especially sophisticated technology or formed any society as complex as a simple tribe. So there are still meaningful biological differences between Neanderthals and modern humans that don’t require the delicate machinery of anthropology to understand. Note: a difficulty here is that “species” is actually a very fuzzy concept, one that Nature itself doesn’t seem to care much about. “Subspecies” is even more vague. Outside of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) there had been only one other conclusively identified “race”[1] of Homo sapiens, the Homo sapiens idaltu. Perhaps there will be more evidence to put Neanderthals in there as well, but the consensus is that they were a separate but closely-related species. [1] “Race” in the scientific sense as a synonym for subspecies, not the social sense of “ethnic group, but with more negative overtones.”
- fpoling 5y ago
  Modern humans have very low genetic diversity. There are more genetic variations among apes in a single group than among all humans on the whole planet. A typical interpretation of this is that we are descendants of small group of survivors, but whatever the reason the consequences is that the genetic variation between Neanderthals and humans can be in fact within normal variation within single species, we just do not have enough data.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    > whatever the reason Both Iceland and Italy have had multiple serious eruptions that could have wrapped around 2 or more winters in Europe and N. Africa, starving almost everybody. I once read that our mitochondria indicates the human population was down to 5,000 at one time. Here's one article mentioning the Toba explosion 70,000 years ago and blocking the sun for 6 years. There's still a Lake Toba: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
    - saurik 5y ago
      For this specific theory involving a massive eruption that blocks the sun for years and staves most of the humans, why would other apes--or really anything else that shares the property of generally eating things from the transitive closure of "runs off sunlight"--not have had the same problem?
      - saurik 5y ago
        Coming back to this after sleeping I am, if anything, even more confused, as I would have expected that, of all the animals, humans would have had the best hope of being the least effected by such a b"light", as we are the smartest, and often most rapidly adaptable (as we can learn new behaviors almost on a dime), species and so, tp the extent to which there were still something to eat, I would have hoped we would have the least amount of population decline...
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
So, the root problem here is that species are not defined by crisp barriers, particularly when we're talking about early homonids. So the old elementary school definition of species as reproductive compatibility is just one thing considered today in choosing where to put the line. Other considerations are morphology and genetic drift. By both those measures Neanderthals are different enough to justify being a separate species, though there is some debate. Take a look at this diagram from wiki and you can see that the evolution of humans was not some sort of clean branching tree, but a messy web including substantial horizontal gene transfer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#/media/File:Homo_sapiens_lineage.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#/media/... Race is a social construct with a tenuous connection to underlying biology.
- tasogare 5y ago
  > Race is a social construct with a tenuous connection to underlying biology. Yes, the connection is so tenous that exactly 100% of Japanese people can guess I am a foreigner and ask where I’m from. And this despite clothing in Uniqlo.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    What I mean by that statement is that the visual traits used to anchor race are a very small number of relatively trivial genes. But more importantly, an accurate historical reading of racial categorization as practiced particularly in the 19th and 20th century in the US reveals that the definition of race isn't even contingent on visible differences. If you go read the writing of our founding fathers you'll find ample examples of how "white" was only applied to Anglo, Norman, Saxon, and similar ethnic groups. Germans, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans... All of these groups were initially considered not white in US history, only to later be assimilated as white in proximate rapid reactions to immigration waves and resulting xenophobia, or similar political/social winds. A similar assimilation is currently emerging with latino Americans. The point is, yes, Japanese folk recognize you as other readily, but that other is based on what are superficial and trivial biological variations in appearance. Japan is pretty infamous for its xenophobia so I'm not quite sure why you'd bring that up as rebuttal of what I'm saying fundamentally, which remains that race is a social construct with a tenuous connection to biology.
suifbwish 5y ago
Because 19th century English majors were masquerading as scientists.
Meandering 5y ago
Race is a colloquial term that references a subset of a species. The exact definition of race is very fuzzy due to historical, political, and sociological implications. Looking at the taxonomy structure in biology[1], I think Neanderthals should be considered an independent species. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank
xtiansimon 5y ago
No expert, but Neanderthal brain size is reportedly larger than Homoerectus (1400 cm^3 versus < 1200 cm^3).
Sylvanius 5y ago
Very interesting discussion. The question of the species as a fuzzy concept goes back to Darwin himself: “From these remarks it will be seen that I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms”. Darwin’s statement can be understood today because if you reason in terms of a conceptual discontinuity between species you allow creationists of any kind to imply the intervention of a divinity (something that still happens today); and also: how would you cope with species in statu nascendi? Notwithstanding that, a sharp criterion that consent us to put a sound demarcation is the issue of “genome incompatibility”: once a genetic barrier has been established between the individuals of any two populations, as the (possible) hybrids are not viable or are sterile, we know that it cannot be reversed by natural means, and the genetic pools of those populations will diverge more and more with time. Therefore, they should be considered as separate species. What about Neanderthals and sapiens? It seems that hybridization occurred when the sapiens who invaded Europe some 50,000 years ago encountered the Neanderthals, who had remained separated from the common ancestor for at least 500,000 years (I do not consider this as an established fact, as it is possible, however improbable, that the segments of Neanderthal’s genome we observe in today Europeans are remnants of common ancestry, which have been preserved in Europeans and lost from today Africans by selection or drift). This would be a strong argument in favor of them being a single species. I personally prefer this view also because it helps to support a less “supremacist” view of our biological roots, showing that not only is our species subdivided in phenotypically recognizable populations, but that it was once subdivided in morphologically distinct subspecies.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pedrosorio 5y ago

The answer is that species is a fuzzy concept defined a long time ago: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-neanderthals-same-species-as-us.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-neanderthals-same-species... https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Homo-sapiens-and-Neanderthals-considered-to-be-separate-species https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Homo-sapiens-and-Neanderthals-...

daveslash 5y ago
Stack Exchange Biology is another good Q&A resource that has an answer. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/39664/how-could-humans-have-interbred-with-neanderthals-if-were-a-different-species https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/39664/how-could-...

nicklecompte 5y ago

The short answer is that it is far from a settled question - many people say “Homo sapiens neanderthalis” as the proposed subspecies. The fact that modern humans and Neanderthals crossbred and apparently had viable offspring is strong evidence for this understanding (but not necessarily conclusive; sometimes mules are fertile). That said, Neanderthals rapidly went extinct after modern human contact, and are vastly genetically different from us compared to any two randomly chosen modern humans. They do not appear to have formed especially sophisticated technology or formed any society as complex as a simple tribe. So there are still meaningful biological differences between Neanderthals and modern humans that don’t require the delicate machinery of anthropology to understand. Note: a difficulty here is that “species” is actually a very fuzzy concept, one that Nature itself doesn’t seem to care much about. “Subspecies” is even more vague. Outside of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) there had been only one other conclusively identified “race”[1] of Homo sapiens, the Homo sapiens idaltu. Perhaps there will be more evidence to put Neanderthals in there as well, but the consensus is that they were a separate but closely-related species. [1] “Race” in the scientific sense as a synonym for subspecies, not the social sense of “ethnic group, but with more negative overtones.”

fpoling 5y ago
Modern humans have very low genetic diversity. There are more genetic variations among apes in a single group than among all humans on the whole planet. A typical interpretation of this is that we are descendants of small group of survivors, but whatever the reason the consequences is that the genetic variation between Neanderthals and humans can be in fact within normal variation within single species, we just do not have enough data.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > whatever the reason Both Iceland and Italy have had multiple serious eruptions that could have wrapped around 2 or more winters in Europe and N. Africa, starving almost everybody. I once read that our mitochondria indicates the human population was down to 5,000 at one time. Here's one article mentioning the Toba explosion 70,000 years ago and blocking the sun for 6 years. There's still a Lake Toba: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
  - saurik 5y ago
    For this specific theory involving a massive eruption that blocks the sun for years and staves most of the humans, why would other apes--or really anything else that shares the property of generally eating things from the transitive closure of "runs off sunlight"--not have had the same problem?
    - saurik 5y ago
      Coming back to this after sleeping I am, if anything, even more confused, as I would have expected that, of all the animals, humans would have had the best hope of being the least effected by such a b"light", as we are the smartest, and often most rapidly adaptable (as we can learn new behaviors almost on a dime), species and so, tp the extent to which there were still something to eat, I would have hoped we would have the least amount of population decline...

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

So, the root problem here is that species are not defined by crisp barriers, particularly when we're talking about early homonids. So the old elementary school definition of species as reproductive compatibility is just one thing considered today in choosing where to put the line. Other considerations are morphology and genetic drift. By both those measures Neanderthals are different enough to justify being a separate species, though there is some debate. Take a look at this diagram from wiki and you can see that the evolution of humans was not some sort of clean branching tree, but a messy web including substantial horizontal gene transfer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#/media/File:Homo_sapiens_lineage.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#/media/... Race is a social construct with a tenuous connection to underlying biology.

tasogare 5y ago
> Race is a social construct with a tenuous connection to underlying biology. Yes, the connection is so tenous that exactly 100% of Japanese people can guess I am a foreigner and ask where I’m from. And this despite clothing in Uniqlo.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  What I mean by that statement is that the visual traits used to anchor race are a very small number of relatively trivial genes. But more importantly, an accurate historical reading of racial categorization as practiced particularly in the 19th and 20th century in the US reveals that the definition of race isn't even contingent on visible differences. If you go read the writing of our founding fathers you'll find ample examples of how "white" was only applied to Anglo, Norman, Saxon, and similar ethnic groups. Germans, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans... All of these groups were initially considered not white in US history, only to later be assimilated as white in proximate rapid reactions to immigration waves and resulting xenophobia, or similar political/social winds. A similar assimilation is currently emerging with latino Americans. The point is, yes, Japanese folk recognize you as other readily, but that other is based on what are superficial and trivial biological variations in appearance. Japan is pretty infamous for its xenophobia so I'm not quite sure why you'd bring that up as rebuttal of what I'm saying fundamentally, which remains that race is a social construct with a tenuous connection to biology.

suifbwish 5y ago

Because 19th century English majors were masquerading as scientists.

Meandering 5y ago

Race is a colloquial term that references a subset of a species. The exact definition of race is very fuzzy due to historical, political, and sociological implications. Looking at the taxonomy structure in biology[1], I think Neanderthals should be considered an independent species. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank

xtiansimon 5y ago

No expert, but Neanderthal brain size is reportedly larger than Homoerectus (1400 cm^3 versus < 1200 cm^3).

Sylvanius 5y ago

Very interesting discussion. The question of the species as a fuzzy concept goes back to Darwin himself: “From these remarks it will be seen that I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms”. Darwin’s statement can be understood today because if you reason in terms of a conceptual discontinuity between species you allow creationists of any kind to imply the intervention of a divinity (something that still happens today); and also: how would you cope with species in statu nascendi? Notwithstanding that, a sharp criterion that consent us to put a sound demarcation is the issue of “genome incompatibility”: once a genetic barrier has been established between the individuals of any two populations, as the (possible) hybrids are not viable or are sterile, we know that it cannot be reversed by natural means, and the genetic pools of those populations will diverge more and more with time. Therefore, they should be considered as separate species. What about Neanderthals and sapiens? It seems that hybridization occurred when the sapiens who invaded Europe some 50,000 years ago encountered the Neanderthals, who had remained separated from the common ancestor for at least 500,000 years (I do not consider this as an established fact, as it is possible, however improbable, that the segments of Neanderthal’s genome we observe in today Europeans are remnants of common ancestry, which have been preserved in Europeans and lost from today Africans by selection or drift). This would be a strong argument in favor of them being a single species. I personally prefer this view also because it helps to support a less “supremacist” view of our biological roots, showing that not only is our species subdivided in phenotypically recognizable populations, but that it was once subdivided in morphologically distinct subspecies.