PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA—Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh argues in the latest issue of Science that the current system of categorizing the human fossil record into genus and species is too narrow for understanding our complex evolutionary history. He said in a press release that “the boundaries of both the species and the genus remain as fuzzy as ever, new fossils having been haphazardly assigned to species of Homo, with minimal attention to morphology.” Schwartz suggests that anthropologists begin again. “If we want to be objective, we shall almost certainly have to scrap the iconic list of (genus and species) names in which hominid fossil specimens have historically been trapped and start from the beginning,” he said. For more on hominid evolution, go to “Our Tangled Ancestry.”
