Questions being asked like "What is human?" or "What defines a species?" have differing answers depending on the specific world-view of the questioner.<p>As I have read the comments already given, it is obvious that there are some here who define a species very narrowly and would therefore treat the Kalhari desert people as a different species to the run of the mill European.<p>Even the word hybrid as applied to living organisms has major problems, especially when used in conjunction with some definitions of species.<p>The upshot of the various definitions is that any organism that breeds with another successfully and produces viable breeding offspring are members of the same species. In which case, Neanderthal is just one of the varieties of the homo sapiens species, no more and no less than any existing human today.<p>I have heard various comments about some people today of how like they are to the images we use for the Neanderthal. Since we only have skeletal remains and no actual corpses, there is much that we cannot tell about how they looked and how different any other bodily feature may have been. The experts use mostly guess work - I am not denigrating guess work based on good evidence. What I am saying is that we don't know with any certitude of the real differences, if any, between modern man and ancient man.