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[CyberPanda]

In a handful of fossilized teeth and bones, scientists say they’ve found evidence of a previously unknown human species that lived in what is now the Philippines about 50,000 years ago. The discovery deepens the mystery of an era when the world was a melting pot of many different human kinds on the move.

Small-jawed with dainty teeth, able to walk upright but with feet still shaped to climb, these island creatures were a mix-and-match patchwork of primitive and advanced features in a unique variation of the human form, the scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.


“Evolution creates mosaics of traits like this,” said anthropologist Matt Tocheri at Canada’s Lakehead University and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Human Origins Program in Washington, D.C., who wasn’t involved in the project. The report makes “a good case that this is something new that we have not seen before,” he said.

The announcement of a new species brings a region of the Pacific once considered a backwater of evolution into the mainstream of early human development,several anthropologists who study human origins said.

Continued here

 

[MetalAlien]

I still say there are at least 3 species of humans living today but it is scientific suicide to publish any research suggesting that so it gets buried in the name of social good will.

 

[PSlayer]

I still say there are at least 3 species of humans living today but it is scientific suicide to publish any research suggesting that so it gets buried in the name of social good will.

Not my field but, isn't the definition of species if two organisms can breed and generate fertile offsprings? are there human groups that don't respect that definition or you're saying the definition is not appropriate?

 

[MetalAlien]

Not my field but, isn't the definition of species if two organisms can breed and generate fertile offsprings? are there human groups that don't respect that definition or you're saying the definition is not appropriate?

Well that's the thing the definition itself should be updated. I look at it from the point of view of an alien. If an alien came to earth without any idea of our social politics what would they see? Would they see us as one species or three very closely related species that have been interbreeding for 1000s of years? I have to go to work so I can't continue this until later but you get the idea,

 

[RedVIper]

Not my field but, isn't the definition of species if two organisms can breed and generate fertile offsprings? are there human groups that don't respect that definition or you're saying the definition is not appropriate?

That's more of a general rule to identify a species.

But its not clearly defined.

 

[Xyphie]

Not my field but, isn't the definition of species if two organisms can breed and generate fertile offsprings? are there human groups that don't respect that definition or you're saying the definition is not appropriate?

It's just a rough boundary people use as a heuristic, there's plenty of arbitrary classifications in taxonomy. Plenty of members of different species can have fertile offspring and on the same note some species can't have offspring with all members of the same species (ring species).