Hominins and Humanity

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How are humans supposed to have Neanderthal DNA? As I see it a species is defined by its inability to produce fertile offspring?

Were they memeing? Or are Neanderthals genetically human?

Liger principle. Almost, but not quite, speciated

Homo sapiens shares a common ancestor with neanderthal and denisovan

Thats one definition, biology is full of people who can't agree on anything definitive.

"Species" are actually really complicated and really arbitrary. No can agree what a species is or what the separates closely related species from one another.

The categories are arbitrary but Neanderthals are humans, just a different type of human than anatomically modern homo sapiens.

The only Africans I know who are against the fact that humans came from an earlier line of proto-humans and apes are dumbass South Africans and Nigerians who were called racial slurs by Ethiopians. Speaking of, Ethiopians are very quick to say that they're from the homeland of humanity, both Sapiens and our genus.

Historically speaking, it was generally the other way around .

>As I see it a species is defined by its inability to produce fertile offspring?

You mean the definition every American child gets taught in high school biology class. It's wrong, and misconceptions like yours are the reason why it was wrong to teach such rubbish to children in the first place.

> how are humans supposed to have Neanderthal DNA?

Because we will fuck literally anything.

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest either way except for intraspecific cannibalism

Bump

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youtu.be/fjELJexYR0Y

Cool vid filling in the gaps between Australopithecus to homo sapiens. Kind of underwhelming how little has changed. All that really happens is that the brain case mushrooms a bit. Spoopy.

We have no idea how erectus, habilis, etc. actually behaved. For all we know they could be completely harmless.

Some people say that Homo erectus and every other species that evolved between then and now are actually the same species. It was considered bullshit until they look at how physically diverse Holo erectus skulls were in a region in country Georgia, and all over the world, ranging from 4 foot tall adults to 6 foot tall kids that are 8 years old.

I feel like the more primitive species like habilis wouldn't be so violent, as they were small and weak.

>4 foot tall adults
Closer to 5 feet, last I checked.

>6 foot tall kids that are 8 years old.
To quote the wiki page for Turkana Boy:
>>Anthropologists Alan Walker and Richard Leakey in 1993 estimated the boy to have been about 11–12 years old based on known rates of bone maturity.[6][nb 2]
>>Christopher Dean (M. C. Dean) of University College London, in a Nova special, stated that Turkana Boy was 8 years old at death.[7][8] But Alan Walker and Richard Leakey said that dental dating often gives a younger age than a person's actual age.[9][nb 3]
>>Ronda Graves and colleagues in the most recent review of the problems involved concluded that he would "have grown an additional five to 14 cm before reaching adulthood" and that "if, at death, he was eight to ten years of age, [he would have been] 154 centimetres (61 in) tall, and growing faster than a modern human but slower than a chimpanzee. According to this scenario, KNM-WT 15000 would have attained an adult stature ranging between 159 centimetres (63 in) and 168 centimetres (66 in)." Moreover, that "according to our preferred models of growth and development, [his] growth in stature [would have been] completed by 12 years of age (4 years after death), so that the majority of growth has already occurred".[3]

The later erectus morphs (Antecessor, Heidlbergensis) show a fairly high degree of cannibalism.

Can someone explain to me why homo ergaster precedes homo erectus in the evolutionary tree? I completed high school in 1999 and was taught it was a transitional species between homo erectus and homo rhodesiensis has something changed since then that it now considered an antecedent of homo erectus?

Honestly, you can probably lump all of the erectus and its contemporaries under a signal species. The entire subject of paleoanthropolgy is so incredibly convoluted with so many opposing viewpoints that nothing is ever set, much less set in stone.

I hate when people mark out cannibalism as any kind of differentiation between the behaviour of different Hominin, for as long as bipedal apes have eaten meat, there would have been cannibalism, even groups of modern humans have been recorded to practise cannibalism as a norm.

I'd also like to take the opportunity to mention that nature does not five a FUCK about how we define things.

Most consider Ergaster to be an African Erectus, that most likely gave rise to both the Asian/European erectines and homo rhodesiensis

I am certain cannibalism was occuring globally amongst all species, but when a third of the representative material (such as the case of antecessor) shows signs of cannibalism, it was probably alot more than just an occasional phenomena.