Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Neanderthals are not a subspecies of Homo Sapiens

Were Neanderthals a sub-species of modern humans?

This article in Phys.Org covers a report in The Anatomical Record. The authors made an in depth study of the anatomy of the nasal region of modern humans and compared them with the same regions of neanderthal fossils. The concluded that the differences are such that the neanderthals were a distinct species from modern humans.

There are nasal characteristics in the neanderthals that have been interpreted as being analogous to those of cold adapted modern humans, such as the Inuit of Alaska and Canada. However, the authors of the study concluded that the neanderthal nasal area was sufficiently different that it was developed by a different evolutionary pathway from that by which the modern human nasal region developed.

My understanding has been that this is not really news. However some neanderthal specialists have been fighting to make the neanderthals be closer relatives than what they really are.

Bill Gill

Nice find, Bill. Thanks for sharing. Speciation is such a big task, finding all the similarities and differences between two similar organisms. It's always a contest between the lumpers and the splitters, and it looks like the splitters win on this one. My vote is for the Neanderthals as distant cousins who diverged pretty far back on the evolutionary tree. They came, they had their day, they went away. Next thing you know, someone will try to resurrect them from DNA fragments, a la Jurassic Park. I'm sure there are people crazy enough to try it.

I agree that it is very difficult to determine species, especially for extinct species. I tend to follow the splitters more than the lumpers, but I suspect that some splitters get really carried away with the idea.

They already have a good genome for the neanderthals. Now all they have to do is to build it up and insert it into a compatible cell. It will be a while before we are able to do that but I wouldn't bet that we won't be able to. We will have to start with simpler organisms, but it may be in the cards. And people are crazy enough that somebody will probably try.

Bill Gill

Bill- Is it not true that humans do in fact have more Neanderthal DNA than was at first recognised; in fact it used to be denied that it was the case at all?

I have seen a number of 4% mentioned, but others suggest that the amount of Neanderthal DNA varies in different individuals and areas.

However does the evidence of even some DNA indicate that interbreeding was possible, which would imply that Humans and Neanderthals shared at least some origin point? I think I agree with AR!

You are right. DNA evidence does show some interbreeding. People from sub-Saharan Africa are the only populations that don't include any. Otherwise it varies from population to population. And of course there are the Denisovans who also shared their genes with us and the Neanderthals. Apparently there was some hanky-panky going on all over the place. The split between our branch and the others apparently took place several hundred thousand years ago. After that we apparently met our cousins after we had come out of Africa and played around a little bit.

The Denisovans of course came as a kind of a surprise. Their DNA was recovered from a single finger bone and surprised people a lot when they were found to not be any recognized Homo species. But they did contribute to the human genome, particularly in Melanesians and Australian Aborigines. There are a lot of questions about that. More information about them can be found on Wikipedia.

Bill Gill