Kind of a technical question: If interbreeding was possible can they even be called separate species? Seems to me to be different varieties of the same species.
ETA: spark240 agrees
Not to picky, were these Space Fellas?
Mu Uncle still thinks that.
That’s a deep, dark hole, conceptually speaking. Biologists aren’t really sure what a species even is, honestly. The Biological Species Concept (species can’t interbreed) is the one most often used , but there are a whole host of exceptions, including hybrids, stress hybrids, etc.
They’d suddenly start going on about how Neanderthal ancestry meant you were superior. And we’d hear a lot about the many virtues of the Neanderthals.
Something similar actually happened historically. For a long time the “scientific” racists claimed that whites were more physically mature, more “adult”, more developed than non whites and pointed to many alleged physical features that “proved” it. Then along came the idea of neoteny, the idea that many creatures including humans had developed new features by retaining them from earlier developmental stages. Suddenly, whites had all sorts of features that “proved” they were less mature, less adult, more neonatal than everyone else.
I should add that there are also a whole host of other theoretical species concepts, all of which may be correct in some circumstances, but fall apart in others.
See also: Geographical Species Concept, Phylogenetic Species Concept, etc.
To put some numbers to my point, the fossils typically recognized as the remains of distinctively Neanderthal individuals range in age from about 130,000 to just 28,000 years old. Whereas the oldest fossils identifiable as “modern” humans are at least 160,000 years old, and depending on definitions and interpretations maybe several times older still. Homo sapiens neanderthalensis were contemporaries of recognizably modern humans for the entire period of their distinction (a period which may well have included contact and occasional interbreeding for longer than it did not). You have to go back at least 250,000 years (and again, perhaps a few times this) to reach fossil ancestors who probably could not have produced fertile offspring with today’s living peoples.
That said, it should be recognized that (a) when speaking of (“biological concept”) species over periods of time, rather than as living contemporaries, the “boundaries” are necessarily always fuzzy, no matter how many sets of fossils we recover, and (b) having Neanderthal ancestors is not at all the same thing as carrying Neanderthal genes. All of us have human ancestors from whom no specific individual gene remains.
Nice post, TriPolar. You lose 2 points for omitting the obligatory Golgafrincham ark fleet reference, but the overall effort is good and worthy of an expanded account. I give it an 8.
Maybe that’s why they were mostly killed off.
According to the modern interpretation of the Biological Species Concept, two populations can be considered to be separate species, even if interfertile, if any hybridization is limited in space and time. Hybridization between modern humans and Neanderthals seems to have been limited to the Middle East, possibly when the there were very few modern humans present. Since the two populations seem to have maintained separate identities with limited or no interbreeding when they co-occurred in Europe over many tens of thousands of years, they could still be considered separate species under the BSC.
None. There are only a few Neanderthal genes in the modern genonome; most of the ones that produced the physical differences have been lost.
No, it was those playing the drums that were killed off:
“If you keep playing those drums in the middle of the night, when I’m trying to get some rest ready for hunting mammoths early in the morning, I’m going to to come to your cave with my biggest club.”
It should be stated that this is not a universal interpretation among biologists. In particular, when I say this to someone, I still get quite a few people saying “Oh, you’re one of those.” 
nm
This explains my wife’s forehead
[QUOTE=Morgyn]
The “language gene” is FoxP2 (this was mentioned in the Neanderthal Code), and it apparently developed a long, LONG time ago.
[/QUOTE]
So Neanderthals were fair and balanced?
I’ll bet she is a mean tennis player.
Hilarious.
Quoth John diFool:
Actually, the previous evidence everyone pointed to as evidence that we didn’t interbreed was all based on the mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted exclusively in the female line. Which suggests that most of the sapiens X neanderthalis crossings were a Neanderthal male with a sapiens female. This might mean that the Neanderthals were taking our women, or it might mean that the Cro-Magnon Borg had different standards for how to assimilate conquered foes, or it might mean that the pairings were consensual, and Neanderthal men liked sapiens women and vice-versa more than Neanderthal women and sapiens men liked each other.
“Why Ooog keep calling Moog Lib-Raal? What Lib-Raal mean?”
Well, I have dated a guy that if you stood him next to a neander skeleton recreation in a museum, you would have anthropologist want to dissect him. Same crest ridge, beetling eyebrows, mildly receding chin, bump on the back of the head, arms long in proportion to legs, barrel chest. Really hysterical. One of the main reasons I have been adamant for years that we do have neander genes in us. Sweetheart of a guy, short about 5’6" but “gentle giant” behaviors.
