RIP for a key Homo species?

摘要

"If someone kills one person they go to jail," anthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Acad-emy of Sciences in San Francisco noted last month at a meeting here in France's deep south. "But what happens if you kill off a whole species?" The answer soon became apparent: anguished debate. In the balance was Homo heidelbergensis, a big-brained human ancestor generally seen as a pivotal figure during a murky period of evolution. At the invitation-only meeting, researchers debated whether this species really was a major player-or no more than a paleo-anthropologists' construct.The big-brained H. heidelbergensis has claimed an important perch in the human evolutionary tree: It's regarded by many as the common ancestor of modern humans and our extinct closest cousins, the Nean-dertals. Dating to roughly half a million years ago, it is thought to link those species and the earlier H. erectus, which had spread across Africa, Asia, and Europe beginning 1.8 million years ago. But based on a new look at the incomplete fossil evidence, some scientists argue that the picture was much more complicated, and that the transition between small-brained H. erectus and larger brained hominins occurred multiple times. If so, the concept of a single, multi-continental, intermediary species could dissolve into a plethora of hominin specimens with no single name to unite them.