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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

I think the title is misleading. Indeed, no Neanderthal exist today. They are extinct as a species.

Sure, there's DNA still around in populations today. But that's true of many, many extinct animals - Mammoth, Auroch, many breeds of dog, even dinosaur.

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Depends on how you look at it. We are descendants of Neanderthals (at least if we have European or Asian ancestry). And we are still here.

It’s like dinosaurs, are they extinct? Tiny dinosaurs are chirping in the trees in my garden right now.

I would not call 1-2% dna descendants. We are a sister group from which we share a partial genetic heritage.

Why did they get so diluted? Or does that mean they were just 1-2% of Homo Sapiens total population by assimilation time, so the original proportion was just kept instead?

The dinosaur to birds comparison isn't a particularly good one. Birds are cladistally dinosaurs, that is, the common ancestor of all birds was a dinosaur. In that sense, there are no birds that are not also dinosaurs.

That's not true with modern humans and neanderthals. A tiny amount of their dna remains in some human populations, but neanderthals are not the common ancestor of all humans. We are all descended from early homo sapiens and the tiny amount of neanderthal dna that persists is totally swamped by the homo sapiens dna.

Sounds similar to red hair. Looking at current demographics red haired people will disappear "soon", but the DNA for red hair will still be around.

That's a myth. It's not how recessive genes work.

There's a interesting question there. How often do species completely disappear and how often do they evolve into something else?

Almost every species that has ever existed on this planet no longer exists. Nothing “evolves into something else“. Evolution is simply constant change over long periods of time. Eventually, the thing that used to be no longer exists, whereas the new thing does. It’s a giant tree of change. This is literally what Darwin discovered.

Species can completely disappear because they can be hunted out of existence, climate change can kill them off, natural disaster's can wipe them out.

https://www.onezoom.org has a neat viewer for the tree of life (one past the home page to the tree itself - https://www.onezoom.org/life/@biota=93302?otthome=%40_ozid%3... )

Note the settings thingy in the upper right for some different views.

"Species" is an arbitrary designation. Maybe arbitrary isn't exactly the right term, but it's a label which says 'right now, this is different from that' , whereas over evolutionary time actual organisms will interact and intermingle in ways which (as seen in these comments!) aren't adequately captured by the categories into which we divide them.

Dinosaurs are also not extinct[1]. I think the confusion just comes from people assuming they know what words mean when they don't.

For example, a bat is a mammel, if all other mammels died except for like 1,000's of species of bats, would you say that mammels went extinct? The title is correct, but you have been misled by the Dunning-Kruger effect.

1. Here is a beginners book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Dinosaurs-Are-Not-Extinct-Facts/dp/00...

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