Religion Turned Bands Into Tribes That Ruled The Planet - OpEd

January 8, 2024
By Rabbi Allen S. Maller

Charles Q. Choi, in Live Science (12/8/2015) points out that scientists in general, and biologists in particular, usually pride themselves in carefully classifying natural phenomena but paleoanthropologists are unusually careless with the way they use the designation ‘human’.
For example, paleoanthropologists often say that the closest living relatives to humans are chimps and bonobos. The key word here is living. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only living members of the genus Homo. Many extinct Homo species have walked the Earth, such as Homo habilis, among the first stone-tool makers, and Homo erectus, the first to regularly keep the tools they made.

Homo sapiens and all related Homo species dating back to the split from the chimpanzee lineage which occurred more than six million years ago, are known as hominins. There are at least ten to twenty named species that evolved before Homo sapiens-humans, most of whom are not directly ancestral to us, all of whom are genetically closer to us than chimps or bonobos, and none of them are Homo sapiens-humans.

Several ancient Homo species and non Homo species have been unearthed in bits and pieces over the years, including one with an orange-size brain, another dubbed the “hobbit” for its miniature size, and a flat-faced hominin with a huge brow ridge. As late as 40,000 years ago there were four Homo species living on earth: Homo Neanderthals, Homo Denisova, Homo floresiensis and Homo sapiens-humans.

The controversy — whether the Homo family tree had few or many branches — is part of a long-standing debate between paleoanthropologists who are split into two groups: lumpers and splitters. The controversy arises because evolution is a gradual process; and the various things that make one species different from another do not evolve simultaneously. For example, the morphology of skulls, teeth, hands and feet change from one Homo species to another, but at different rates. How does one determine if a skeleton belongs to species a or b when a fossil shows evidence of some, but not all, of the changes that will eventually differentiate them.

More:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/08012024-religion-turned-bands-into-tribes-that-ruled-the-planet-oped/