It seems odd to think of "them" and "us" as entirely different.
Think of Neanderthals and humans as two big statistical clusters (of gene prevelance). So individual genes from the neanderthal cluster exist, but the cluster does not.
So e Neanderthals do have descendants though, us.
What we don't have is clusters as distinct from eachother as Neanderthals/Sapiens. Even within the sapiens cluster, there were more distinct sub clusters then than now. But, sure.. clusters still exist. My family are more closely related to eachother than to yours.
One could now argue that if two differences in one thousand DNA bases constitutes different subspecies, then maybe one in a thousand does so, too, but at the very least it constitutes a different race. One could, and both thresholds would be arbitrary.
Most biologists these days have decided that defining the terms "species" and "subspecies" properly is futile, and they stopped using the term "race" altogether. So... all differences are now officially unimportant. Neanderthals were humans, too! Sort of...
Yes. Neanderthals as a population don't exist anymore.
The house cat and tiger shares 95% of the same genes. If tigers disappeared, you wouldn't consider it an extinction because we have house cats around?
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0918/House-cats-and-t...
Also, the common ancestors of humans and the common ancestors of cats became extinct a long time ago. Are you saying those "creatures" aren't extinct because humans and cats are around?
Edit: An additional example for those interested. Birds today share same genes as tyrannosaur rex.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dinosaurs-shr...
Really? Surely this claim would require the sequencing of the T-Rex genome, which I'm guessing is an impossibility.
But then neither is the Homo Sapiens of that era, surely?
> The house cat and tiger shares 95% of the same genes. If tigers disappeared, you wouldn't consider it an extinction because we have house cats around?
If they interbred now and there was gene transfer within that 5%, I think that would be an entirely different situation to the one you describe.
The picture that is often painted of the Neanderthal following a parallel evolutionary course to 'us', Homo Sapiens. But 'us' is actually a hybrid of the two.
> Also, the common ancestors of humans and the common ancestors of cats became extinct a long time ago. Are you saying those "creatures" aren't extinct because humans and cats are around?
Of course not, and you seem to be entirely misunderstanding my question.
If humans and cats somehow interbred and the ongoing population of cat-human hybrids was what carried on, identifiable fully as neither, the picture is much more grey.
Saying "neanderthals as a population don't exist anymore" tells us nothing, because no ancient population exists anymore - they have all been replaced by their descendants. "Extinct" is not the same as "dead".
If we make a phylogenetic tree showing descent, extinction would mean the tree ends - there are no descendants. This is clearly not the case for Neanderthals.
The set of all the descendants of a given species is a valid concept, but it is not the definition of a species (note, for one thing, the awkward self-referentiality if it were.)
Species are about populations, extinct species occur when there are no extant populations.
You can dig down into the definition of species and what defines the boundaries between them, that's a big topic with basically no bottom.
Every time the quality of the genome improved, the estimated admixture decreased. Isn't that a bit suspicious? And even if it isn't purely an artifact, the direction of the admixture was never established. Could be some neanderthal genes survived in humans, could be some human genes died with neanderthals. Could be that the analysis is no good.
I'll admit that the facts can be reinterpreted in the future with more data. But calling them "suspicious" makes it sound like there is some conspiracy now.