| Not me |
Two months ago, I killed some time by trying to understand the ins and outs (mostly outs) of the australopith-Homo transition by reading two bona fide scientific papers of a mostly non-technical kind (the third link below).
Two other pieces have since come to my attention (link one and two).
They are both about Homo habilis, the "official" transitional species between Australopithecus and Homo erectus (or H. ergaster, if you like that better).
As per usual, Bernard Wood argues that Homo habilis isn´t really a proper human form, but rather belongs in a genus all its own, or perhaps in Australopithecus.
John Hawks argues for caution in a wittily titled article called "The plot to kill Homo habilis". Dude, I assumed he had been dead for about 2 million years! Hawks fears that there will be complete chaos in the nomenclature if H. habilis is renamed, since eveyone will take that as a signal for renaming a lot of other fossil species. Given all the new fossils currently coming out of Africa, that would be a mistake that will just create havoc in the scientific nomenclature (although I suppose academic journals might be happy profiting from all the published papers).
As far as I can make out seven years later, Hawks won this battle, since the unfortunate habilines are still firmly entrenched up our family tree...
Human evolution: Fifty years after Homo habilis
No comments:
Post a Comment