Re:Thanks to interbreeding, just 7% of our DNA is unique to ...
by dragonwriter on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @06:15PM
(#27990458)
> I wonder if we knew the Neanderthals were a different species.
Whether Neanderthals are a different species in genus Homo (H. neanderthalensis) or a different subspecies of H. sapiens (H. sapiens neanderthalensis) doesn't even seem to be completely a matter of consensus today (similar is true of Denisovans, for instance.)
And, honestly, the more evidence of ongoing, successful, fertile interbreeding we find, the less strong the “separate species” argument is, though its ultimately unresolvable because there's not a clearcut objective definition of what constitutes a “species”.
Taxonomy isn't (well, the decision as to which taxonomic level a division is, at least, isn’t; the phylogenetic organization is) science so much as a necessary tool to have names for things to use when doing science.
Whether Neanderthals are a different species in genus Homo (H. neanderthalensis) or a different subspecies of H. sapiens (H. sapiens neanderthalensis) doesn't even seem to be completely a matter of consensus today (similar is true of Denisovans, for instance.)
And, honestly, the more evidence of ongoing, successful, fertile interbreeding we find, the less strong the “separate species” argument is, though its ultimately unresolvable because there's not a clearcut objective definition of what constitutes a “species”. Taxonomy isn't (well, the decision as to which taxonomic level a division is, at least, isn’t; the phylogenetic organization is) science so much as a necessary tool to have names for things to use when doing science.