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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 ...
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 ...
There are seven main taxonomic ranks: kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus, and species. In addition, domain (proposed by Carl Woese ) is now widely used as a fundamental rank, although it is not mentioned in any of the nomenclature codes, and is a synonym for dominion ( Latin : dominium ), introduced by Moore in 1974.
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 term phylum was coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel from the Greek phylon (φῦλον, "race, stock"), related to phyle (φυλή, "tribe, clan"). [4] [5] Haeckel noted that species constantly evolved into new species that seemed to retain few consistent features among themselves and therefore few features that distinguished them as a group ("a self-contained unity"): "perhaps such a real and ...
Despite the fact that the word animal is colloquially used as an antonym for human, [11] and contrary to a common biological misconception, humans are animals. [12] The word person is often used interchangeably with human , but philosophical debate exists as to whether personhood applies to all humans or all sentient beings , and further if a ...