I really begin to wonder if these different species of man are really all that different. Many of us are walking around with apparently some percentage of Neanderthal DNA, so it’s pretty much a given these different species are similar enough to produce viable offspring. The whole “nearest relative” thing really seems to blur into nothing more than genetic drift among different groups of humans.
About us having neanderthal DNA. Perhaps. But I believe the association to neanderthal DNA isn’t as strong as we thought about 5 or 10 years ago.
If, in 150K years from now, someone were to dig up fossils of Ken Jeong, Shaquille O’Neil, Joe Rogan and Tom Brady...I would imagine they would conclude that we had 4 different species roaming America in 2021.
Yep, humans are rare as a species as all of us are so closely related. We’re all descended from the same small number of people rather recently.
That also makes the gap between us and other species very large.
Compare that to dogs, where wolves, coyotes, jackals, and dogs can all interbreed and there is huge variation within each species. For most creatures the lines between species is much blurrier than for us.