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Human taxonomy is the classification of the human species within zoological taxonomy. The systematic genus , Homo , is designed to include both anatomically modern humans and extinct varieties of archaic humans .
Homo (from Latin homō 'human') is a genus of great ape (family Hominidae) that emerged from the genus Australopithecus and encompasses only a single extant species, Homo sapiens (modern humans), along with a number of extinct species (collectively called archaic humans) classified as either ancestral or closely related to modern humans; these include Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis.
The Hominidae (/ h ɒ ˈ m ɪ n ɪ d iː /), whose members are known as the great apes [note 1] or hominids (/ ˈ h ɒ m ɪ n ɪ d z /), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: Pongo (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); Gorilla (the eastern and western gorilla); Pan (the chimpanzee and the bonobo); and Homo, of which only modern humans ...
Homininae (the hominines), is a subfamily of the family Hominidae (hominids). (The Homininae— / h ɒ m ɪ ˈ n aɪ n iː / —encompass humans, and are also called "African hominids" or "African apes".) [1] [2] This subfamily includes two tribes, Hominini and Gorillini, both having extant (or living) species as well as extinct species.
The classification of living things into animals and plants is an ancient one. Aristotle (384–322 BC) classified animal species in his History of Animals, while his pupil Theophrastus (c. 371 –c. 287 BC) wrote a parallel work, the Historia Plantarum, on plants. [7]
The principal ranks in modern use are domain, kingdom, phylum (division is sometimes used in botany in place of phylum), class, order, family, genus, and species. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus is regarded as the founder of the current system of taxonomy, as he developed a ranked system known as Linnaean taxonomy for categorizing organisms ...
The orangutans were reassigned to the family Hominidae , which already included humans; and the gorillas were grouped as a separate tribe (Gorillini) of the subfamily Homininae. [3] Still, details of this reassignment remain contested, and of publishing since (on tribe Hominini), not every source excludes gorillas and not every source includes ...
LD 350-1 is now considered the earliest known specimen of the genus Homo, dating to 2.75–2.8 Ma, found in the Ledi-Geraru site in the Afar Region of Ethiopia. It is currently unassigned to a species, and it is unclear if it represents the ancestor to H. habilis and H. rudolfensis , which are estimated to have evolved around 2.4 Ma.