We know that modern people descend from populations that were much more diverse than any populations living today." "It's not a muddle, it's a braided stream. "Today we know that 1970s-era view was just wrong," Hawks said.
Early anthropologists were looking to consolidate several hundred thousand years of human evolution into a single global stage, but they didn't have the evidence. What those fossils have shown, Hawks argues, is that things weren't muddled, just complex. Though there's always a need for new fossils, there are a lot more Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils than there were a half-century-ago, when scientists first began speaking of the muddle in the middle. "The problem is not that we don't have enough names, it's that we don't have enough fossils." "I agree that many scientists are confused about the classification but I think adding yet another species name is not going to help," Hawks said. Not everyone is convinced of the need for a new species designation. "Ultimately, we hope that our paper will start a wave of much needed taxonomic and conceptual revisions of hominin systematics," Radović said. The new, clearly defined species should help facilitate better communication among paleoanthropologists, the researcher said. "Taxa names - especially so in paleontology - are ultimately tools that enable scientists to organize morphological variation and communicate," Radović said. Though there is no magical missing link between ape and humankind, the authors of the latest paper argue there is an important link between Homo bodoensis and Homo sapiens - and for scientists aiming to tell the complicated story of human evolution, it's a link that warrants further investigation.Īs Roksandic and Radović tell it, Homo bodoensis was in the right place, at the right time and with the right combination of traits to be an important intermediary hominin species - one that warrants an updated taxonomical classification. Homo bodoensis features no Neanderthal-derived traits, but the would-be-species hosts many traits conserved in Homo sapiens. "DNA studies have revolutionized the field of paleoanthropology, especially in the last decade, and have shown that morphologically distinct species such as Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans freely exchanged genes." "It was the genetic data, amongst others, that prompted us to define the new species," Radović said. Recent DNA studies have shown that several specimens in Europe that had previously been classified as Homo heidelbergensis were actually early Neanderthals.
They were developing in pseudo isolation in Europe," Roksandic said. "Neanderthals are much more easily recognizable because they were the most diverged. "You see more of these ancestral traits in Asian and African specimens than in Neanderthals, so this is where a lot of the confusion around Middle Pleistocene hominids come from," Roksandic said. The confusion and miscommunication to which Roksandic and Radović speak is partly the result of evolutionary biology.ĭespite their evolutionary progress, humans and their closest relatives retained numerous primitive traits - morphological features that defined the different hominins that preceded them.
sapiens-like, or derived, morphological traits," co-first author Predrag Radović, researcher at the University of Belgrade in Serbia, told UPI in an email. " Homo bodoensis is defined based on the specific combination of H. "But they had not yet differentiated into modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and other related lineages." "There is a recognition that these hominins are not exactly Homo erectus, which preceded them," Roksandic said. "The legacy of colonial theft and extraction makes me pause," Hawks said.īut while the names Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis may be problematic or nonfunctional, their invention and sporadic use reflects the distinctiveness of these Middle Pleistocene hominins. " Homo rhodesiensis is a bad name," John Hawks, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the new study, told UPI in an email. Most of the hominins that would be reclassified have been previously assigned to either Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis, the latter of which alludes to Rhodesia and the bloody legacy of European colonialism in Africa. "This is just opening the door to communicate and encourage the conversation around the movements of late Pleistocene hominins," Roksandic said. If different scientists have different definitions for hominin species, it becomes difficult to parse shared data and incorporate the findings of others into ongoing investigations. "The point of the naming is that it allows us to build hypotheses that can be tested and that other scientists can understand," lead author Mirjana Roksandic, paleoanthropologist and professor at the University of Winnipeg, told UPI.
0 kommentar(er)
