1. A lineage perspective on hominin taxonomy and evolution.
- Author
-
Martin JM, Leece AB, Baker SE, Herries AIR, and Strait DS
- Subjects
- Animals, Phylogeny, Biological Evolution, Fossils, Hominidae anatomy & histology
- Abstract
An uncritical reliance on the phylogenetic species concept has led paleoanthropologists to become increasingly typological in their delimitation of new species in the hominin fossil record. As a practical matter, this approach identifies species as diagnosably distinct groups of fossils that share a unique suite of morphological characters but, ontologically, a species is a metapopulation lineage segment that extends from initial divergence to eventual extinction or subsequent speciation. Working from first principles of species concept theory, it is clear that a reliance on morphological diagnosabilty will systematically overestimate species diversity in the fossil record; because morphology can evolve within a lineage segment, it follows that early and late populations of the same species can be diagnosably distinct from each other. We suggest that a combination of morphology and chronology provides a more robust test of the single-species null hypothesis than morphology alone., (© 2024 The Authors. Evolutionary Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF