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by AlotOfReading
1134 days ago
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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. |
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