Did the Neanderthals and Homospaiens from thousands of years ago go extinct and we are their great grand children? Like most of us have some Neanderthal DNA so does that mean they never died out?

Question

I was just thinking about this, and wanted to ask

In: Biology

Answer 1

Wolves and dogs share 99.9% DNA, does that make a dog a wolf?

The line that makes different species isn’t a hard set thing, it’s actually a wider grey area because sometimes it’s difficult to define if two species are truly different because they are so similar.

The general rule seems to be, if they are unable to interbreed successfully then they are separate species. Some dogs can’t make offspring with wolves, but others can. So what does that mean?

So we classified Dogs as a subspecies of Wolf because they are very similar but still clearly different.

It’s believed that Neanderthal and Humans interbred but all male children were sterile like Mules. The evidence for this is that all of our Neanderthal DNA is in the X chromosome.

So originally there were human + Neanderthal hybrids, but over time they bred with humans to the point were the Neanderthal DNA is barely noticeable. Red Hair is believed to have come from our Neanderthal genes for example.

So Neanderthal is extinct because they are no living examples. We just happen to have a small amount of their DNA.

But Europeans that have said DNA are extremely similar to Africans that don’t, and we can interbreed without issue, so we aren’t considered different species.