La Trobe

A lineage perspective on hominin taxonomy and evolution

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posted on 2024-04-16, 23:47 authored by Jess MartinJess Martin, Angeline LeeceAngeline Leece, SE Baker, Andrew HerriesAndrew Herries, DS Strait
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.

Funding

This research was funded and supported by HDR fee waivers and living scholarships from La Trobe University to Jesse M Martin and an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP170100056 to Andy I. R. Herries and David S. Strait. David S. Strait was further supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG FOR 2237: Project "Words, Bones, Genes, Tools: Tracking Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Trajectories of the Human Past").

History

Publication Date

2024-04-01

Journal

Evolutionary Anthropology

Volume

33

Issue

2

Article Number

e22018

Pagination

13p.

Publisher

Wiley

ISSN

1060-1538

Rights Statement

© 2024 The Authors. Evolutionary Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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