Homo sapiens
- Latin:
- “wise man”
- Key People:
- Tim D. White
Homo sapiens, the species to which all modern human beings belong. Homo sapiens is one of several species grouped into the genus Homo, but it is the only one that is not extinct. See also human evolution.
The name Homo sapiens was applied in 1758 by the father of modern biological classification (see taxonomy), Carolus Linnaeus. It had long been known that human beings physically resemble the primates more closely than any other known living organisms, but at the time it was a daring act to classify human beings within the same framework used for the rest of nature. Linnaeus, concerned exclusively with similarities in bodily structure, faced only the problem of distinguishing H. sapiens from apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gibbons), which differ from humans in numerous bodily as well as cognitive features. (Charles Darwin’s treatise on evolution, On the Origin of Species, would come 101 years later.)
(Read Ray Kurzweil’sBritannica essay on the future of “Nonbiological Man.”)
Since Linnaeus’s time, a large fossil record has been discovered. This record contains numerous extinct species that are much more closely related to humans than to today’s apes and that were presumably more similar to H. sapiens behaviorally as well. Following the ancestors of modern human beings into the distant past raises the question of what is meant by the word human. H. sapiens is human by definition, whereas apes are not. But what of the extinct members of the human tribe (Hominini), who were clearly not H. sapiens but were nonetheless very much like them? There is no definitive answer to this question. Although human evolution can be said to involve all those species more closely related to H. sapiens than to the apes, the adjective human is usually applied only to H. sapiens and other members of the genus Homo (e.g., H. erectus, H. habilis). Behaviorally, only H. sapiens can be said to be “fully human,” but even the definition of H. sapiens is a matter of active debate. Some paleoanthropologists extend the span of this species far back into time to include many anatomically distinctive fossils that others prefer to allocate to several different extinct species. In contrast, a majority of paleoanthropologists, wishing to bring the study of hominins into line with that of other mammals, prefer to assign to H. sapiens only those fossil forms that fall within the anatomic spectrum of the species as it exists today. In this sense, H. sapiens is very recent, having originated in Africa more than 315,000 years ago (315 kya).
(Read Yuval Noah Harari’s Britannica essay on the future of “Nonconscious Man.”)
Evolution
Before about 1980 it was widely thought that distinctively hominin fossils could be identified from 14 to 12 million years ago (mya). However, during the 1970s geneticists introduced the use of molecular clocks to calculate how long species had been separated from a common ancestor. The molecular clock concept is based on an assumed regularity in the accumulation of tiny changes in the genetic codes of humans and other organisms. Use of this concept, together with a reanalysis of the fossil record, moved the estimated time of the evolutionary split between apes and human ancestors forward to as recently as about 5 mya. Since then the molecular data emerging from DNA sequencing and a steady trickle of new hominin fossil finds have pushed the earliest putative hominin ancestry back in time somewhat, to perhaps 8–6 mya.