[summa_tech]

First, I like your username. Second, I think it may be a problem of ebb and flow of scientific discourse (shifts in how we apply the definition of species) more than reflecting underlying reality, which - as you said - has no easy resolution.

[throwup238]

It’s not the ebb and flow so much as avoiding pointless academic bikeshedding. A bunch of very competitive explorer archaeologists named the separate species based on morphological skeletal differences decades before we even knew about DNA and now as the evidence accumulates, the question has gone from hard facts to a debate what is a species vs subspecies. Nobody really cares about the latter because it makes no functional difference to the research, so they let the problem lie until new interesting evidence presents itself. We know the species could interbreed, which is what matters to us now, not whether their taxa is three words or two (which is what this boils down to, some people write one way, some people the other and both know what each other is saying)