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Yes, the myths definitely need busting. To explain what I mean a little more: No doubt there were differences between Neanderthals, Denisovans, and 'Sapiens' (and I've never understood why differences in brain case size are considered significant), but what I'm mainly concerned with here are definitions, i.e. how much difference is possible within a 'species'.
(NB I also don't like using the word 'interbreed' when speaking about people, although when I first started to think about this, I used it myself.)
Now, I realise this may not be current thinking any more, but I always thought that 'species' was defined as 'can produce fertile offspring with one another', between male and female in the case of mammals, for instance. All I've ever read suggests to me very strongly that all human groups were able to produce fertile offspring together, and that they are all woven into our story. I seriously doubt that any group of humans ever fully 'died out' or 'became extinct'. Sure, they bashed each others' heads in all the time, like humans have always done, but they also produced fertile offspring.
My question has long been how much difference remains after that to still call different humans members of different 'species'. What does 'species' mean if it's not special enough to procreate alone? I strongly suspect that it's simply inapplicable to humans. I think that if we were to find any evidence of different human species, it would be in the very early stages of our evolution, i.e. probably in Africa, but probably not outside it. Obviously, we have various extremely old fossils from across a long, long period of time, and it's possible that those at the start of the development would not have been able to produce fertile offspring with those at or towards the end of the chain, because by then significant enough changes in their composition had taken hold, but I think it most likely that people would always have been part of one contemporaneous species.
Again, I'm no expert, just an armchair conjecturist, and one reason why I care about the answer to this is because I think establishing beyond doubt that there have never been any really significant differences between people would help to some extent with the fight against racism.
Oliver Schick-
No doubt there were differences between Neanderthals, Denisovans, and 'Sapiens' (and I've never understood why differences in brain case size are considered significant), but what I'm mainly concerned with here are definitions, i.e. how much difference is possible within a 'species'.
Brain case size was a metric/shorthand for intelligence and there is a correlation between cognitive abilities and size/ complexity so early hominids ( think Lucy and the Australopithecines ) did not have the same level of complex reasoning ability that Sapiens, Neanderthals and all the other undiscovered relatives undoubtedly did.
They were however different species albeit very closely related whereas obviously all living human beings are members of the same species.
There is evidence of relatively low interbreeding ( I’m going to stick with that as it’s the scientific term, although I share your distaste of its appropriation by those trying to ‘scientifically’ justify their racist nonsense) between Sapiens & Neanderthals shown by the genetic transmission of Neanderthal genes - less than 2% . ‘ We find that observed low levels of Neanderthal ancestry in Eurasians are compatible with a very low rate of interbreeding (<2%), potentially attributable to a very strong avoidance of interspecific matings, a low fitness of hybrids, or both‘.https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1107450108
I think establishing beyond doubt that there have never been any really significant differences between people would help to some extent with the fight against racism.
Yes absolutely agree and in fact would qualify this to extend the notion of personhood to other forms of life and outwards from Homo Sapiens who as you point out are significantly the same but that is of course another debate
Big_Nick
I was taught by Chris Stringer when I did an Anthropology degree. This was before they had the genetic evidence but the thinking was that there probably had been Sapiens and Neanderthal interbreeding. Technically the article is correct in referring to Denisovans and Neanderthals as different species - I don’t think it’s meant to be derogatory and note that Neanderthals had larger brain cases than Sapiens. There was a famous site where they’d buried a child with flowers which I remember being haunted by as a student so the standard image of the brutish caveman was discredited a long time ago but it’s still a persistent myth. William Golding’s novel The Inheritors is a rethinking of that caveman myth and implies that maybe the ‘wrong’ human species made it to the present.