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Prehistoric Humans May Have Interbred With Two Separate “Superarchaic” Species
(www.iflscience.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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I never heard that, and I can't even think of a way that evidence could show that...
We know that for whatever reason there's less neaderthal on the X chromosome, but that doesn't have anything to do with sterility of offspring at a high frequency.
It most likely was just that any mutation that did make it over, was outcompeted. Which comes back to the prevailing theory that "modern" humans main advantage was reproducing like bunnies, and that advantage was carried on our X chromosome.
That would mean the neanderthal DNA that was passed down and still around, came over from the crossing of male neanderthals with female humans to male sons. Which (going off memory) we do have evidence to support.
Those "hybrids" would have children with "human" X's even if they were daughters, but be introducing neanderthal DNA back into a "double human X" mother, ensuring her daughter still had the reproductive advantages over a neanderthal mother still, but retaining neanderthal genes adaptive to the northern climate.
Shake and bake a couple generations, you get white people.
But at no point does it mean any "hybrid" was sterile, just that a thousand years later they didn't have direct living descendants, an incredibly common thing especially back them.
Edit:
This already happened with cro-magnons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon
Because we only had morphology to go off of, they were labelled a separate species.
However that was largely due to their harder lifestyle than genetics and with DNA testing they're now recognized as a "sub species" which is why later waves of "modern" humans reabsorbed them into the gene pool so quickly, likely along with some neanderthal DNA as icing.
All I'm saying. Is that eventually the other "archaics" will get the same recognition as "siblings" on the family tree and not "cousins".
It's just human variation is far wider than popular opinion or present examples.
In other species that intermix like that, you see stretches of DNA where all admixture is excluded, because it's instantly selected out. In humans, such a stretch exists, and has to do with sex determination, which is a pretty much a smoking gun. I'm finding stuff about the Y chromosome, but I thought there was something on the X chromosome to do with testicle development as well.
Obviously, female hybrids were fertile at least some of the time, since there is admixture. But, it's possible every half-and-half male hybrid ever ended up sterile, and later generations would probably have had higher rates of sterility.
The general idea that humans are irrationally obsessed with categories and tribes holds, but this doesn't seem like a clear-cut example.
Anyone outside of Africa has similar-ish admixture; skin colour has little to do with it. European hunter-gathers at the end of the ice age were what we'd consider black, and they were replaced by Middle Eastern looking and originating agriculturalists. The light skin colour is from Eurasian steppe nomads that rode in on the first horses in the bronze age. Other unrelated groups, like from the Caucuses area or pre-modern Japan, also have/had light skin.
I'm sorry, there's just so many incorrect things you just gishgalloped that were never gonna get thru this.
I can't explain anything if every time I try you being up 5 more things you need explained.
Here, I won't add anything, I'll just cited what I've brought up:
The Neanderthal stuff is recent research and still kind of in flux, so you could object that there might be another interpretation somehow. The bit about everyone outside of Africa having admixture is here, and it actually mentions that east Asians have the highest proportion.
On the origin of white people, here's the steppe herder component and here's the bit about them having horses. This is the Middle Eastern agriculturalist part and these are the original hunter-gatherer inhabitants of western Europe, specifically the section on them likely being black and blue-eyed.
This is a photo of historical Ainu in Japan which gives a sense of why I'd compare them in appearance to Europeans, as some of the Europeans themselves did. There isn't actually a close relation: