RE: Pre-Historic Nookie!
August 23, 2018 at 5:47 pm
(This post was last modified: August 23, 2018 at 5:57 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(August 23, 2018 at 5:40 pm)Khemikal Wrote: Interspecies breeding is unbelievably rare compared to intraspecies breeding.
If we reference a foggy moment when all three were in the act, so to speak, of speciation, we are are explicitly proposing de-facto subspecies, which is still intraspecies breeding.
No. If the interbreeding between two population occurs but results in offspring sex ratio and rates of fertility dramatically from those seen with breeding within each population, then the two populations are different species.
They are not de-facto subspecies.
When one weighs whether the evidence of some success in interbreeding between Neanderthal and HSS indicates they were of the same species or of two closely related, but different species that retains limited capacity to interbreed successfully, one needs to factor in the fact that morphological differences between the populations were much larger than seen within modern HSS population, and the fact that Neanderthal appears to exhibit substantially different growth pattern from child to maturity compared to HSS. This latter difference is not often observed within the same species.
If we see this difference in two otherwise very similar populations of bears or moose today, we are unlikely to regard them as if the same species or two subspecies under the same specie.
