docroberts t1_j510f46 wrote
Reply to comment by Slashy1Slashy1 in Given that reproduction is difficult or impossible when both animals have different numbers of chromosomes, how did so many species evolve to have so many different numbers of them? by MercurioLeCher
Fertility is one of many factors in the evolutionary equasion. In evolutionary time human populations have been very scattered At the center of a slightly isolated population this lineage reproduces normally. On the periphery of the isolated population there are more miscarriages, but adequate reproduction for introgression of useful genes into the population. It's probable Neandertal/Sapiens hybrids and Denisovan/Sapiens hybrids were significantly less fertile, yet their genes made it into our pool. Surprisingly the ancestral trees of individual genes are often very different than the species tree.
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