Humans may be older than first thought (Earth, science, Article)

[crystalonyx]

I thought "hominids" went back 4 million years or so to the "Lucy" fossils discovered in African a while back.

[TurkeyOnRye]

This may be nit-picking, but these days we say "hominin," not "hominid." Ignore the spell checker.

[Kungfuzed]

People are always lying about their age. People actually think I'm younger than I actually am.

[Seyorni]

Originally Posted by TurkeyOnRye

This may be nit-picking, but these days we say "hominin," not "hominid." Ignore the spell checker.

Interesting, I'd not heard about this.

"Hominid" is derived from our Linnaean family Hominidae. I've also heard "hominian."
I know the traditional Linnaean taxonomy is being replaced by phylogenetic cladistics, but it's always been a great source of useful classifing terms.

How is hominin derived?

As for my spell checker, it disappered mysteriously a month or so ago.

[Jaiket]

Originally Posted by TurkeyOnRye

This may be nit-picking, but these days we say "hominin," not "hominid." Ignore the spell checker.

I think hominid and hominin are different taxonomic terms identifying different levels in the hierarchy.

[Melancholy]

The article on this subject stated Human European.
So I worded the title of this thread to reflect that.

I'm not going to argue semantics, I just thought it would be good to put out new news and evidence that Europeans were around a lot longer than was first thought and further specualtion starting about Africa being the first origin of human species etc.

[painted wolf]

Actually this find isn't of a human.... so Europeans arn't any older.

What the jaw fragment is from is a hominin, a species close to us but not "us".
It demonstrates that shortly after the African speciation there was a radiation out of Africa and into new lands. There is no change in the African origin of Humanity.

Humanity is still where it is... regardless of the hyperboly of newspaper headlines.

wa:do