Why It Might Be Time to Rethink the Human Family Tree
The traditional classification of ancient humans into the genera Homo, Australopithecus, and Paranthropus may not reflect true evolutionary relationships. New fossils and genetic analyses reveal that these groups often fail to form clades—single ancestors and all their descendants—and that traits like brain size and diet don't align with the family tree. A new paper argues for revising the taxonomy, possibly by expanding Homo to include Australopithecus and Paranthropus, to better reflect the complex, branching evolution of hominins.
The fossil record seems to be increasingly showing a large, branching burst of evolution beginning around 4 million years ago, with diet, brain size, movement, and tooth size all varying substantially among groups in ways that don’t necessarily map neatly onto their true relationships.
- m3047
Research is coming out specifically regarding the COVID genome which suggests missing sequence data was routinely filled in from baseline reference sequences. In turn, the reference sequences suggest during later analysis constant reversion back to the baseline. These gaps are the (dot) product of limitations of PCR * computer processing algorithms. No reason to believe the problem is limited to COVID.
- bibimsz
isn't it kind of suspect that there was all this diversity and branching conveniently right up to today and then it stopped. seems ideological.