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It's not so much that scientists changed their minds, it's more that those who were strongly opposed to the idea either retired or died of old age. It's the same pattern with lots of scientific ideas we take for granted.

There's really no fixing it. Taxonomy is just a way for humans to divide things up to try to understand them. It's not an inherent quality of nature.

The leading thinking right now is that they evolved in Europe and Asia, not Africa. There is an interesting map about 1/4 of the way into this article.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.html#:~:text=When%20did%20Neanderthals%20live%3F,physical%20evidence%20of%20them%20vanishes.

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I am not expert about non-African hominids, but I guess this implies that there were already some/many hominids outside of Africa leading up to Neanderthal. We (homo sapiens) were just a branch that still evolved in Africa.

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If I'm not mistaken, all Caucasian people and many Asians have 2 to 6 percent Neanderthal DNA.

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we Homo sapiens share a common ancestor with neanderthals, commonly beleive to be H. heidelbergensis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis who evolved in Africa. So you can pretty much say that neanderthals was kind of humans as well. it's often why we refer to them and denisovans as cousins, fascinating stuff really ! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal has a pretty good section on the evolution of neanderthals.

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If you want to see an extension to your pondering, your comment reminds me of this video which always makes me chuckle when I watch it!

The guy probably made it as a joke… but now I can’t be sure he’s not some kind of time traveler…

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I can see that. Maybe its a time thing. Science and history will probably mean something different in the future. Just like how science and history are different from the past.

>The concept of species seems vague and not very scientific.

That's because applying any sort of strict categorization to a very fuzzy system isn't going to go nicely. Animals don't just gain a feature and are suddenly unable to reproduce with similar creatures, inability of interbreeding is based off of what specific mutations any individual species has gained. You can have extremely different organisms that are capable of interbreeding or you can have extremely similar organisms that are incapable of interbreeding. You can even have a set of ring species where species A can breed with species B, B can breed with C, C with D, D with A, but A cannot interbreed with C, nor can B breed with D.

Capability of interbreeding seems like a nice clean dividing line for species, but nature doesn't divide things up nicely into boxes. A taxonomy based off of genetic drift with speciation based off of morphology and behavior is the best we can do to satisfy the human need to categorize everything into nice compartments. If a neanderthal has a different set of bones and body structure as well as a radically different primary diet and metabolism, why does it make sense to talk about it as the same as Homo Sapiens?

Seems like a different crowd. Scientists simultaneously understand and embrace evolution and dna etc. Yet they also use ‘species’ when ‘regional variant’ or something similar is more appropriate. I think it’s because scientists like to discover new species, and don’t like to discover ‘a fossil of a known species that might be a little different looking’. Again, Victorian holdover.

Homo neanderthalensis evolved in Europe, parallel to Homo sapiens in Africa, from a common African ancestor of the genus Homo. The Neanderthals migrated from Europe to parts of west and central Asia.

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I think its because changing people's way of thinking about species (especially human species) is really hard. A good portion of the population already don't want evolution taught in school. Now throw in anything that makes it sound like we are not even %100 human.

"God's perfect and unique creation based off of his image not even human?!?!" /s

Moreover it is really not strongly supported that humans actually outcompeted Neanderthals in any particular way. They could been bred out, died of disease, or many other outcomes. The argument that we necessity survived because we were better on some way is not very scientific. Weaker and less resilient species win out all the time for obscure reasons.