A common, working definition of a species is that it’s a discrete population of organisms that doesn’t naturally interbreed with other groups. By this definition, there are probably more than 10 million species on Earth today, including about 5,000 mammals, of which about 435 are primates. However, every individual within a species is different, and genomes evolve over time. How different can an individual or group be before it should be considered a separate species Members of different species can still interbreed if they are not yet too genetically distinct. Some species interbreed only under human control; for example, a mule or hinny is the offspring of a horse and a donkey but is sterile. However, other species interbreed successfully in the wild, and we now know that our species Homo sapiens did so with Neanderthals and other archaic human species.