4 ms·
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 human
by 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 agoModern 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 agoFor 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 agoComing 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...
- anthonypasq 5y agoits more because only a very small subset of humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world. There is more diversity in sub-saharan Africa than the ret of the world combined.
- madacol 5y agoBut neanderthals are found in europe, not africa. Doesn't it go against your argument?
- nicklecompte 5y agoThere were very few Neanderthals in Europe who had viable offspring with modern humans compared to the size of the (otherwise quite heterogenous) migration wave coming from Africa - and their DNA was obviously very similar to ours from the beginning. So it makes sense that the net impact on genetic diversity wasn’t very large, even if it is detectable.