I also enjoyed seeing how Bobbie Short and our Russian counterparts discuss this; Bobbie’s site I have relied on the most in my adventures and find it refreshingly non-commercial.

I followed the link to Hawks site (and wished I was that grad student) and note this statement and agree:

“One may argue that extant mammalian families have a distribution of ages, or even of genetic variation, and that this should inform our taxonomic choices. But the logical endpoint of this argument is not that the human lineage is a tribe-level or infrafamily-level taxon, but instead the endpoint is the conclusion of Goodman et al. (1998), that the human lineage is a subgenus-level entity and chimpanzees should be placed in Homo. The fact that this solution is viewed as “too extreme” is good evidence that this is at its core an aesthetic concern rather than a scientific one.”

So, I will begin to use hominin, and given my poor typing/editing am sure to have spellings representing the variation homin…and I won’t be wrong!

I’ve seen sometime-confusing representations in the recent sasquatch literature – calling the creatures hominids in one paragraph, and hominoids in the next. Of course, given this recent reshuffling, the discovery of the sasquatch might lead to an even further one. I could see the sasquatch being aligned with some of what we now consider hominins, and that group being set apart from us.

Or not.