Some cladists already do;
“Cladistic Classification:”
Superfamily Hominoidea
…Family Hylobatidae
…Genus Hylobates (gibbon)
…Family Hominidae
…Subfamily Ponginae
…Genus Pongo (orangutan)
…Subfamily Homininae
…Genus Gorilla (gorilla)
…Genus Homo (two species of chimp and humans)
damn splitters!
To finally clear up the confusion:
If you come from Europe, you are almost certainly descended from Cro-Magnon man. They are modern humans in every sense of the word; you could pull one out at birth, adopt him, and he’d do fine in High School. The phrase simply refers to one group of pre-civilized humans.
Neaderthals probably contributed something to our gene pool, but maybe not. Work on this question goes back and forth and will not be resolved for years, if ever.
From New Scientist.
"…The new study found that 99.4 percent of the most critical DNA sites are identical in the corresponding human and chimp genes. With that close a relationship, the two living chimp species belong in the genus Homo, says Morris Goodman of Wayne State University in Detroit.
The small difference between genotypes reflects the recent split between chimps and humans, says Goodman, who dates the divergence to between five and six million years ago."
::sigh::
I always thought a great illustration of genetic diversity would be Shaquille O’Neal vs. Woody Allen.
I saw the 99.4% number, too. It’s interesting because the number keeps changing over time, sometimes going up and sometimes going down. I’d take the 99.4% number with a grain of salt. As for the chances of chimps being put in Homo, I wouldn’t bet even 2c on that. (There may be some homo chimps out there, but no Homo chimps.:)) First, we’d have to get rid of the genus Australopithicus, and even that would take some earth shaking new data.
I started this thread a few weeks ago to get some info on what it really meant to be X% genetically the same. There was some excellent input given by Colibri.
Oh, yeah, if you’re interested the whole idea of Homo vs Pam, and you don’t mind a book thats a bit dated, check out Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee.
A sidenote on the Neanderthal/Modern human disconnect:
(Somebody help me with the timeline here) It appears that there was a great die-out of humans 150,000(?) years ago. All humans are extremely closely related to each other compared to individuals within other species. We are all genetically related to an “Eve” that survived.
Is this what eliminated our connection with Neanderthal?
There have been findings of skeletons that have a mix of Neanderthal/Modern Human traits. How do you reconcile these skeletons with the Mitochondrial evidence?
Not quite.
There is a mitochondrial Eve, that is one female that is ancestral to all humans. However she wasn’t just the one female that survived. Ther isn’t even any evidence that she was a memeber of any particularly small group or that humans weren’t already widespread.
The mitochondrial Eve undoubtedly existed alongside thousands or probably hundreds of thousands of other women. The reason she shows up is that all the sons, grandsons etc. of those hordes of other women eventually ended up marrying one of Eve’s daughters, grandaughters etc. This led to all humans being direct female-line descendants of this one woman. But it undoubtedly happened long after Eve died. Probably tens of thousands of years after. Up til that point we weren’t all related to that Eve, but a far older Eve, possibly not veen Homo sapiens.
So while we are all related to ‘Eve’, Eve wan’t especially a survivor. She may have only had one child and died at the age of 15. Many other owmen doubtless survived longer and had more children.
Any number of ways.
Maybe the hybrids were sterile like mules. Finding mule fossils doesn’t invalidate the genetic evidence that tells us that horses and donkeys never interbred.
Maybe ther was a severe social restriction against hybidisation. Hybrds would be rare and if they were fertile would be rejected by both human and Neanderthal tribes. They couldn’t pass on any genetic material to modern humans or Neanderthals.
Maybe there are genetic reasons why humans outcompeted Neanderthals. Maybe those carrying those genes led to an early death or lack of romantic sucess. As a result those genes could well have died out in the modern human population even with intermingling. The genetic tests carried out using Neanderthals use very short fragments of genetic material. It’s possible that all those fragments have been associated with genes or even entire chromosomes that have been selected against. We are only able to test tiny fractions of Neanderthal DNA, not the whole genome. Maybe the sections we’ve got aren’t representative.
One theory holds that we (Homo spaiens) went thru a “genetic bottleneck” about 75k yrs ago. At that time it is postulated that there may have been as few as 10k modern humans (H. sapiens) alive, and that we are all decended from that group. While this is not a fully accepted “fact”, it is the dominant theory at this point.
However, that has nothing to do with our “disconnect” with Neanderthals. Think of the timeline. H. erectus was the only human species around at roughly 500k yrs ago. In Europe, erectus evloved into Neanderthals. In African, erectus evolved into us. So our link goes back long before the genetic bottleneck.
Sapiens met up with Neanderthals in the Middle East and Europe as fully differentiated species. It’s hard to imagine that interbreeding was not possible, but there is no genetic evidence to date that it happened. Granted, the data is skimpy, but if we had to decide based on what data there is, we’d have to say that Neanderthals contributed nothing to the genetic makeup of the people in the world today.
There have been a few skeletons found that might show interbreeding, but anthropologists are not at all in agreement about whether they actually do or not. Some say yes, some say no.
I should not that there are a few (small minority) of anthropoligists who put erectus, neanderthalensis, and sapiens in the same species and claim that modern Europeans are decended from Neanderthals. This is pretty much outside the mainstream, but a few die hards are still holding out.
A single ambiguous skeleton found in Portugal. Damaged and juvenile, it is quite controversial as to whether it reflects hybrid traits or not. I am unaware of any other such finds.
I would amplify that I believe the evidence suggests that erectus split into several species or near-species due to isolation (Eurupe, Asia, Africa), Homo sapiens, the African version, displaced all of them.
To date the genetic evidence continues to point in a single direction, excluding any meaningful and likely any non-African contribution at all.
As others note, while inter-species sex probably happened there is no evidence at all that it resulted in viable, non sterile offspring. That could have been for any number of reasons.
The “hybrid” Portuguese skeleton is interesting, since it was dated at 3k yrs after the last Neanderthal is thought to have died out. It has limb proportions typical of Neanderthal, but cranial elements of sapiens. Also, some inner ear structures are oddly Neanderthal. But the jury is still out. The discoverers of this skeleton are in favor of the hybrid theory, but others are not convinced. I’m unaware if any DNA ananlysis has been done. That would be interesting.