
Human evolution was shaped by interbreeding - nikolasavic
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151013-how-interbreeding-shaped-us
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ZeroGravitas
If they interbred successfully, doesn't that make them all part of the same
species? Or are there is there a great area there?

~~~
Turing_Machine
It's not that simple. Suppose you have a group of animals spread across a
large continent.

The ones on the eastern side can breed successfully with the ones in the
center.

The ones on the western side can also breed successfully with the ones in the
center.

The ones on the eastern side are different enough from the ones on the west
that they _can 't_ breed successfully.

How many species are there? :-)

It's a continuum, not a binary relation.

It's very similar to the way that in historic times you could travel the
Germanic or Romance language areas of Europe and the people in one village
could always understand the people in the next village, but after a couple of
hundred miles the languages would be mutually incomprehensible (this is not
nearly as prominent today due to the rise of strong national governments
enforcing "standard" languages through schools).

There are a lot of other issues involved, too. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem)
for some discussion.

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swagv
I learned this a couple years ago. I'm not sure what's new about it now.

