Can someone who knows more about anthropology explain to me what makes Neanderthals their own species and not just a separate race?
That said, Neanderthals rapidly went extinct after modern human contact, and are vastly genetically different from us compared to any two randomly chosen modern humans. They do not appear to have formed especially sophisticated technology or formed any society as complex as a simple tribe. So there are still meaningful biological differences between Neanderthals and modern humans that don’t require the delicate machinery of anthropology to understand.
Note: a difficulty here is that “species” is actually a very fuzzy concept, one that Nature itself doesn’t seem to care much about. “Subspecies” is even more vague.
Outside of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) there had been only one other conclusively identified “race”[1] of Homo sapiens, the Homo sapiens idaltu. Perhaps there will be more evidence to put Neanderthals in there as well, but the consensus is that they were a separate but closely-related species.
[1] “Race” in the scientific sense as a synonym for subspecies, not the social sense of “ethnic group, but with more negative overtones.”
Both Iceland and Italy have had multiple serious eruptions that could have wrapped around 2 or more winters in Europe and N. Africa, starving almost everybody.
I once read that our mitochondria indicates the human population was down to 5,000 at one time.
Here's one article mentioning the Toba explosion 70,000 years ago and blocking the sun for 6 years. There's still a Lake Toba:
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
There is more diversity in sub-saharan Africa than the ret of the world combined.
Other considerations are morphology and genetic drift. By both those measures Neanderthals are different enough to justify being a separate species, though there is some debate. Take a look at this diagram from wiki and you can see that the evolution of humans was not some sort of clean branching tree, but a messy web including substantial horizontal gene transfer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#/media/...
Race is a social construct with a tenuous connection to underlying biology.
Yes, the connection is so tenous that exactly 100% of Japanese people can guess I am a foreigner and ask where I’m from. And this despite clothing in Uniqlo.
But more importantly, an accurate historical reading of racial categorization as practiced particularly in the 19th and 20th century in the US reveals that the definition of race isn't even contingent on visible differences. If you go read the writing of our founding fathers you'll find ample examples of how "white" was only applied to Anglo, Norman, Saxon, and similar ethnic groups. Germans, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans... All of these groups were initially considered not white in US history, only to later be assimilated as white in proximate rapid reactions to immigration waves and resulting xenophobia, or similar political/social winds.
A similar assimilation is currently emerging with latino Americans.
The point is, yes, Japanese folk recognize you as other readily, but that other is based on what are superficial and trivial biological variations in appearance. Japan is pretty infamous for its xenophobia so I'm not quite sure why you'd bring that up as rebuttal of what I'm saying fundamentally, which remains that race is a social construct with a tenuous connection to biology.
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Homo-sapiens-and-Neanderthals-...
Notwithstanding that, a sharp criterion that consent us to put a sound demarcation is the issue of “genome incompatibility”: once a genetic barrier has been established between the individuals of any two populations, as the (possible) hybrids are not viable or are sterile, we know that it cannot be reversed by natural means, and the genetic pools of those populations will diverge more and more with time. Therefore, they should be considered as separate species.
What about Neanderthals and sapiens? It seems that hybridization occurred when the sapiens who invaded Europe some 50,000 years ago encountered the Neanderthals, who had remained separated from the common ancestor for at least 500,000 years (I do not consider this as an established fact, as it is possible, however improbable, that the segments of Neanderthal’s genome we observe in today Europeans are remnants of common ancestry, which have been preserved in Europeans and lost from today Africans by selection or drift). This would be a strong argument in favor of them being a single species. I personally prefer this view also because it helps to support a less “supremacist” view of our biological roots, showing that not only is our species subdivided in phenotypically recognizable populations, but that it was once subdivided in morphologically distinct subspecies.
Looking at the taxonomy structure in biology[1], I think Neanderthals should be considered an independent species.