Neanderthals and Denisovans were humans like us, but belonged to different species. …Bit self-contradictory there, no? Antediluvian humans were humans, descended from Adam just like us.
Well, they have to dance around the fact that this find actually is good evidence that many of the supposedly different species of “homo” were really just minor variations of regular old humans. It’s not convenient to admit that when they want to construct their whole grand narrative that there is a line of progression from apes to men.
Yet, we now know that Denisovans and Neanderthals co-existed, and interbred. We also know that Cro Magnon (who they now have admitted were homo sapiens) and Neanderthals co-existed and interbred. How many other of the homo “species” would we have to admit were all genetically compatible variants if we could only recover DNA to test it? I would wager it would be just about all of them, save the ones that look nearly exactly like the great apes.
If that were established, we would be left with the fact that all the variations represented either simple change in the same human species over time, or local variations in humans that aren’t much different than the local variation we still see today. That’s not the kind of conclusion that evolutionary biologists are hoping to promote.