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Categorizing humans based on phenotypes is a socially controversial subject. Biologists originally classified races as subspecies, but contemporary anthropologists reject the concept of race as a useful tool to understanding humanity, and instead view humanity as a complex, interrelated genetic continuum. Taxonomy of the hominins continues to ...
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.
All modern humans are classified into the species Homo sapiens, coined by Carl Linnaeus in his 1735 work Systema Naturae. [9] The generic name Homo is a learned 18th-century derivation from Latin homō, which refers to humans of either sex. [10] [11] The word human can refer to all members of the Homo genus. [12]
Today, all humans are classified as belonging to the species Homo sapiens. However, this is not the first species of homininae: the first species of genus Homo, Homo habilis, evolved in East Africa at least 2 million years ago, and members of this species populated different parts of Africa in a relatively short time.
Traditionally, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans were grouped together, excluding humans, as pongids.Since Gray's classifications, evidence accumulating from genetic phylogeny confirmed that humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas are more closely related to each other than to the orangutan. [3]
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 ...
For instance, modern humans are Homo sapiens sapiens, or H. sapiens sapiens. In zoological nomenclature, higher taxon names are normally not italicized, but the Botanical Code , the Prokaryotic Code , the Code for Viruses , the draft BioCode [ 4 ] and the PhyloCode [ 2 ] all recommend italicizing all taxon names (of all ranks).
Humans (Homo sapiens) are a species of hominid and the only surviving species of the genus Homo. There is only one extant subspecies , H. sapiens sapiens . The main article for this category is Human .