(September 10, 2015 at 8:48 am)Exian Wrote: Why did they go with homo for Naledi? Can someone give a brief explanation for the criteria? Is it the feet and pelvis? Maybe the teeth?
From amongst the earlier hominid ancestors that live from from roughly 4.5 to roughly 2 million years ago, the determination of which ought to be included in the genus homo, and what ought to be excluded, seems often more subjective than objective.
But to be correct, the morphology of feet, pelvis, and teeth ought not to be the deciding criteria for each species. Rather, a species belong in the genus homo if either one of two criteria is fulfilled:
1. a particular species is suspected to be ancester all to all other homo species, and none of that species' descendants belonged to a genus other than homo, than that species itself belongs to homo genus.
2. If a particular species is clearly descended from another species which is indisputably a member of the genus homo, than the first species belong to the homo genus as well.
But since DNA degrade and we have no easy way of determining just who is descendent from whom, we have to fall back on guesstimating using bone morphology.
