Study suggests that Neandertals shared speech and language with modern humans

[Rahul]

I'm always uncomfortable with these distinctions of various ancient humans as "species." We already know at HNS and HSS interbred as did HNS and the Denisovans. That would seem to throw a monkey wrench into the more strict definition of "species" to begin with.

Well species has always been kind of nebulous.

Wolves and domesticated dogs are called different species and they can interbreed. There are a lot of animals like that.

Nature doesn't confirm perfectly black and white with how humanity tries to describe it.

I've read other studies that said even though modern European humans have a certain amount of neanderthal DNA that offspring was a rare occurence even when we tried to interbreed with them. We were just almost too far apart for it to ever be successful.

Thanks for the study. I hadn't seen it before.

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We probably did more than that... like use them as slaves and rape their females, and perhaps contributed to their extinction.

I rather doubt that. Neanderthals were pretty tough hombres. If we did contribute to their extinction it was probably just because of competition more than direct conflict.