Readers who are interested in this kind of thing may be interested in the new book by Svante Pääbo, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes.[1] Pääbo was the first researcher to figure out how to sequence DNA from ancient human beings, starting with Egyptian mummies and eventually leading to the complete sequencing of Neanderthal nuclear genomes.
Perhaps not entirely surprising, when you consider how much better Tibetan high-altitude adapations are when compared to Andean people's. So the idea that they evolved in the span of 3,000 years seems suspect. Very interesting that they seem to have picked them up from a relict population - perhaps this is related to the Yeti stories?
I think it captures the general fuzziness of it all. "Species" don't really exist. All the classifications and taxonomies are fuzzy, to various degrees. Even parent-offspring is a tricky concept.
Is the Tasmanian Devil facial cancer a new species? Did it evolve/mutate from tasmanian devils? Is it an offspring of a specific devil?
We have 50% genetic similarity with bananas - does that make us nearly bananas? More to the point, we have 96%-98.8% (depending on how you calculate it) similarity with chimpanzees. Presumably our similarity to Neanderthals would be very close to 100%
"More than half" is a very poor measure unless you define "more than half" of what. I think it's a fair point to make that Neanderthals are not entirely extinct - a good portion of their genes just are.
I guess one way to look at it is, assume that there are some genetic markers that make someone look asian. Now genocide everyone who's "pure" asian, i.e. has more than 50% of those markers. Would you consider "asian people" to be "extinct" then, even though most if not all of their genetic markers are sill in circulation in the human gene pool?
I have had many co-workers I suspect of being mostly banana.
Literature I'm seeing suggests humans and neanderthal were related subspecies. I suspect one measure of "not existing" is when there's no clearly distinguishable neanderthal clan or trait cluster. Though there are people who have features which look strongly neanderthalic.
I've been reading bits and pieces of various aspects of anthropology and human evolution. It seems that cro-magnon man were likely an early sub-species or tribe which settled across northern Africa, as far out as the Azores, and along what's now the Spanish-France border region. All of which now show similar linguistic roots. And suggest that the Basque language, unrelated to others in Europe, is derived from cro-magnon.
The Roma people migrated from India toward southeastern Europe.
And there's solid anthropological evidence of settlements in what is now the Black Sea, living on what was then dry land, prior to it being flooded and inundated about 5600 BC. Now if only there were a flood myth in human tradition ....
Ordinarily, different species can't produce fertile offspring. A species thus isolated could go extinct without any ambiguity. So it seems worth making a distinction between complete extinction and when closely-related genetic lines recombine and merge.
There's a subgroup of Asians spanning the Himalayas and east Asia that have blue bottommed babies that is generally believed to denote an ancestry that shares Genghis Khan, iirc. Anyone know whether this group is the same as the one that shares the Denisovan gene?
There's one other thing that I think people living in the Himalayas have, myself included, that helps and that is proportionately humongous lungs. This is probably evolution at work over the course of centuries.
That makes sense actually, given the belief that native Americans came from central Asia before the ice melted on the Bering Straits. When you compare native Americans with Asians from around the Himalayan region, the features are strikingly similar. I wonder if native Americans also have the high altitude gene at the same level of probability as Tibetans, given their shared blue bottoms? :)
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Svante-P%C3%A4%C3%A4bo/e/B00GJ9XR7O/