I might be really mistaken but I'm really curious. So, as far as I know, some animals can interbreed even though they'll produce infertile offspring, like horses and donkeys, bobcats and domestic cats, zebras and donkeys and so on... I think Homo idaltu were closely related to us, does that mean if a Homo idaltu man was alive today and I mated with him then we could make a baby? Would it be infertile? Would there be gametic isolation?
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Caucasians are about 4% neandertal, based on genome comparisons. We've also got about 5 other close relatives mixed in. Homo ergaster left Africa first and its descendants were scattered across Asia and Europe. There are chances other groups also left Africa, and their descendants scattered, too.
When Homo sapiens eventually left Africa, we encountered these other groups of humans and clearly interbred with them. They are extinct, but traces of them still exist in our DNA. To get a pure, Homo sapiens, practically-no-hybridization human, you'd have to hunt about in Africa itself.
No reason to think we didn't mate with the other species. If Homo idaltu were in the same region as Homo sapiens during the same time period, I don't doubt that one of our ancestors got busy with one of them! Since we were fertile with groups that were much less closely related to us, I think it's a given that Homo idaltu and sapiens crosses would be fertile.
When Homo sapiens eventually left Africa, we encountered these other groups of humans and clearly interbred with them. They are extinct, but traces of them still exist in our DNA. To get a pure, Homo sapiens, practically-no-hybridization human, you'd have to hunt about in Africa itself.
No reason to think we didn't mate with the other species. If Homo idaltu were in the same region as Homo sapiens during the same time period, I don't doubt that one of our ancestors got busy with one of them! Since we were fertile with groups that were much less closely related to us, I think it's a given that Homo idaltu and sapiens crosses would be fertile.
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that is really hard to say... generally the more distantly related species are the less likely it is for them to have offspring if the interbreed. Their ability to produce offspring really depends on the genetic relationship but paleontologists can in most cases only compare morphological differences (of the bones they find). From the bones it seems like homo sapiens and homo idaltu are very closely related (on wikipedia homo idaltu is acctually counted as a subspecies of homo sapiens), so it is very possible that we could interbreed with them, and if homo idaltu was in fact a subspecies of the modern humans that the offspirng should be fertile. This is more or less speculative though.
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It's impossible to say without genetic sampling (and even then, tough without actually doing it)
To my knowledge no genetic material of H. idaltu ha ever been recovered.
To my knowledge no genetic material of H. idaltu ha ever been recovered.