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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadence" data-source="post: 9132090" data-attributes="member: 6701124">Apparently my attempt to deflect the irl taxonomy failed. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />If they were still alive and interbreeding with us naturally across their range would Neanderthals be considered a separate species from us today? Separate sub-species? (In Ornithology with overlapping ranges does it depend on how robust the hybrids are? How do they speculate that would have been? How does it work if they're more robust than the one but not the other? Thinking of the two main kinds of chickadees).If we had an AI trained on how speciation was determined by mammalogists up through the year 2000 (except for homo sapiens) and sent one back to 5,000BC (?) would it say we had a bunch of subspecies of Homo sapiens back then?  Would that answer be an emphatic no by the same algorithm today?  If we did the same but the rules by ornithologists would.we have a bunch of species back then (thinking of the lorikeets across various islands) and emphatically not today?I have no idea.  But it feels like between  the  fields the taxonomic levels aren't all that consistently used and a lot of species and sub-species are kind of ad-hoc and messy (reflecting the difficulty of categorizing things that are or were more continuous).  Note: No formal phylogenetics training, have skimmed some papers on the avian kind.  Do know about the statistical sides of clustering and other multivariate methods.</blockquote>

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