re: #1 wheat-dogg

Technically, Neandertals were humans, just a different subspecies of hominids from Homo sapiens. The Atlantic needs to brush up on their biology.
en.wikipedia.org

It’s an interesting puzzle how we ended up being the only sub-species left. I tend to wonder if modern H. Sapiens actively wiped out the others the way we would spend the next 50,000 years trying to exterminate the various color variations within the one surviving branch. Between 50 kya and 1 mya there were at least five subspecies and 2 possibly distinctly other hominid species alive in Africa, Europe and Asia. The exact number is dependent on when some disappeared (Australopithicus? H. Erectus? ) and how distinct the speciation of others were. Yet now there’s only one…