Thread: How far back into the evolutionary tree are homo-sapians sexually compatible?

I'm aware that homo-sapians could have offspring with homo-neanderthalensis, but could homo-sapians hypothetically have offspring with, say, homo-erectus or even homo-habilis? I know it could never have happened as only h. sapians and h. neanderthalensis ever occupied the same time and territory; But hypothetically, if we could transport any ancestor from the past into modern times, how far back could we go before we could nolonger have offspring with them?

The book "Erectus Walks Amongst Us" tackles this issue pretty thoroughly. I'm not a geneticist so I'm skeptical myself but the book claims Europeans and Africans interbred with neanderthals and erectus respectively.

The book "Erectus Walks Amongst Us" tackles this issue pretty thoroughly. I'm not a geneticist so I'm skeptical myself but the book claims Europeans and Africans interbred with neanderthals and erectus respectively.

We haven't done genetic testing on Homo Habilis or Homo erectus, therefore we are unable to determine how closely related we are and whether or not we could breed, although that is a hypothetical question, as you pointed out.
We can currently only breed with other humans- we are not compatible with any of the great apes, for example.
(Don't know if that helps, but we all have a common ancestor but cannot breed.)

One could postulate that our line directly descended from Cro Magnon (Who had some neanderthal traits) to homo sapien, to homo sapien sapien.

A species is generally defined as a group of organisms that can reproduce viable offspring through breeding with one another....I guess there's no real way to test the question.