It’s not possible to fix.

Here’s a question for you. There are three species of zebra— grevy’s, mountain, and plains. You might wonder “why aren’t they all just the same species?”

It’s a good question. Turns out all three species have completely different number of chromosomes. Sure, they all look very similar and can interbreed, but once you start to look underneath the hood, you discover complicated distinctions. Lumping them all together erases those distinctions and is an oversimplification in that case.

That’s what scientists struggle with and why there’s so much discussion. You have animals that LOOK very much alike, but when you unravel their genomes and trace their phylogenetic and geographical history, you realize a lot of those similarities are very superficial.

There’s no “fixing” that. There’s just making adjustments and tweaks as we gain more information and improve our understanding of how different groups of similar animals relate to each other.

Humans and Neanderthals have the same number of chromosomes. But under the hood, we’re looking at evidence that hybridization wasn’t simple, and that the male offspring of such unions may have been infertile or even sterile. That suggests that the two groups were far more distant than any ethnic distinction you’d find in modern humans today, while still being a lot closer to each other than a Plains Zebra is to a Grevy’s Zebra.

The comparison may be a lot more similar to domestic cats and Asian leopard cats. The crossing between those two species produces the breed we know as Bengal cats today. But not all the direct offspring of such pairings are fertile— interestingly, as in Human-Neanderthal hybrids, the male offspring are often infertile. But nobody in their right mind would say an Asian Leopard Cat is the same species as a domestic housecat.

That’s just one example of why it’s complicated.