New Species of Orangutan Is Rarest Great Ape
news.nationalgeographic.com
news.nationalgeographic.com
Inspection of the skeleton for specific details, and genetic tests prove that while interbreeding is possible, this other group was separated by geography for generations. That's not something that would be immediately obvious by unaided observation.
Their vocalization is different, but a detail like that would be quickly challenged, if put forward as proof on its own.
It's interesting that these subtleties permit the identification of a distinct species. I would have thought deeper, more obvious difference would be required, but I guess this level of taxonomy is mostly just for the sake of utility, when examining specimens.
What you are witnessing is a small skirmish between the Lumpers and the Splitters [1].
The really interesting thing to me, is that basically everyone in Academia is a Splitter these days except when talking about humans, where everyone suddenly converts to Lumpers.
Though I would argue that at least in the modern times, communication and transport mean that no identified group of humans is actually totally isolated anymore from the other humans, which makes it more difficult to argue that they can be different species on this ground.
Academia doesn’t value negative results (‘we spent years and tons of money on this, but it looks like there’s only one species’ or ‘we found another few homo erectus bone fragments’) as high as positive ones (‘a new species of great ape’ or ‘the first evidence for a missing link’)
There likely also is bias in what appears in the press. That will affect a layman’s perception of the distribution between Lumpers and Splitters.
(For human languages, governments often push towards splitting. “A language is a dialect with an army”)
Goes both ways. Nationalists often push towards lumping language varieties spoken inside the country (e.g. calling Low German "German" and not a variety of Dutch); sometimes they also split with the variety spoken in another country (calling Dutch "Dutch" and not a variety of German).
Note: I don't mean to imply anything about the current governments of Germany or the Netherlands, but more about the time around the formation of Dutch and German national identities.
For some groups of extant organisms, there are still competing species concepts in operation, extensive genetic sampling is not always performed (although it was in this orangutan study), and other sources of evidence are relied upon. Also, our existing Codes of Nomenclature technically permit the kind of "taxonomic vandalism" practiced by rogue taxonomists like Raymond Hoser.
In these cases (I can think of examples in many groups in all the eukaryote kingdoms) you get more lumpy and more splitty approaches (an oversimplification that pained me to type). And you certainly get that when it comes to higher-than-species-level taxa. So it's just not true to say that basically everyone is now a splitter.
In phylogenetic terms, a species concept is supposed to define an independently evolving genetic cluster. These things exist in reality - we don't observe a continuum of extant forms in nature - and the quest to delineate these clusters objectively has necessarily become a statistical quest. As much as possible we want to map classification to real units of diversity.
In the case of us mammals there's a broad consensus on long-established criteria for performing this mapping, although individual cases are not always without contention. But the idea that modern biology fails, for ideological reasons, to correctly split classification into further species in the singular case of Homo sapiens, is silly.