[bee_rider]

I remember when I was a kid, textbooks would draw a distinction between “homo sapiens” and “homo sapiens sapiens.” But it is odd, when I search “homo sapiens sapiens,” I only see links to like, homework helper/yahoo question sites referencing it. Wikipedia and the Smithsonian seem to have dropped the second sapiens.

Is this an update to how this stuff is understood? I vaguely think the extra sapiens was added on to draw a distinction between “behaviorally modern” humans or something like that. But that always seemed more like a cultural thing anyway.

[AlotOfReading]

This was an artifact from a long-running debate about how we should organize the taxonomy of genus Homo. On one hand, people made good arguments that archaic hominins like Neanderthals were distinct enough to consider them separate species. On the other, there were reasonable arguments that they were closely related enough that archaic and modern hominins were a single species with a number of distinct subspecies. Modern humans would be called H. sapiens sapiens in the latter scheme.

This debate was mostly ended in favor of the separate species perspective by the early 2000s, but not everyone was reconciled and archaeogenetics forced us to rewrite the human taxonomy anyway. People will understand what you mean if you continue using H. sapiens sapiens, it's when you use "H. sapiens" to include Neanderthals and Denisovans that people will be confused. Sometimes that terminology is also also used it to exclude transitional subspecies like idaltu, which I think is why wiki uses it.

[themgt]

imo the correct answer is this stuff is incredibly complicated and in incredible flux due to revolutionary advances in genetic research on our prehistoric ancestors and present day people. There's a lot of different perspectives but anyone with some humility would admit a new finding could be announced tomorrow that would upend quite a lot of what we think we know. Already e.g. Naledi, Denisovans, Floresiensis, Longi, Oase, etc are pretty mind-blowing to the consensus views 20 years ago. I would pay less attention to the labels used and more on the broader research.

[tmtvl]

The "Human taxonomy" page on Wikipedia still adds the second sapiens to Homo sapiens sapiens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy

This may be because Homo sapiens sapiens is the Homo sapiens type species, but I'm not sure.