As this thread is full of wrong, allow me to venture my own knowledge and opinions.
Humans feature a very unique mutation which makes interbreeding with other great apes impossible. Specifically, chromosomes 2 and 3 are fused. This is a very complex, multi-step mutation. Chromosomes have telomeres at their ends (which tell the DNA duplicator to stop) and a centomere in the middle which allows the duplicator to proceed. For the chromosome fusion mutation to happen, you have to deactivate the centomere which was in the middle to make what is effectively a new telomere, and then activate the telomere which is now in the middle so it now serves as a centomere. So this mutation has three steps (a structural mutation and two point mutations) which must occur simultaneously or else you make one or both chromosomes useless.
Now here's the stretch; this mutation is effectively God's DRM key on humanity. It completely stops all possibility of natural interbreeding with an ape or chimp which doesn't have this mutation because the DNA is formatted differently. For this mutation to not instantly die off, you need a minimum of two people (a male and a female) to have the exact same mutations (same two chromosomes fused, same orientation, same telomere and centomere alterations) and for those two to live close enough in time and space to have children.
We can infer that all that actually happened purely from the fact we are alive and our DNA has this extremely strange mutation and this mutation could not exist otherwise.
My point is that it's meaningless to call any human subspecies which can interbreed with homo sapiens anything other than another homo sapiens. You have to be on this side of this mutation to interbreed.
Greetings!
Sounds good, Fheredin!
You are aware that all of the Paleontologists, Archeologists, and Anthropologists at all of these dig sites and at the uber elite universities have all formed a *consensus* that historically, there have been different human species, and that somehow, they intermixed and interbred with each other?
*Shrugs* That I just what I have read in the academic literature, and seen in the documentaries where they interview "Professor X" and "Scholar Y".
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
They've been arguing for centuries whether the different hominids are separate species, like the difference between a lion (
Pantera leo) and a leopard (
Pantera pardus), or separate sub-species like the difference between an African leopard (
Pantera pardus pardus) and an Arabian leopard (
Pantera pardus nimr ).
The genus
Homo is very much like the genus
Canis because not only did different sub-species interbreed and produce fertile offspring, but different species did, too. Usually when different species interbreed, the result is sterile (like mules or ligers) but Denisovians (a hybrid of Neanderthals and our species) reproduced for many thousands of years. Both genera are taxonomical headaches.