Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree | Hacker News Reader

Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree

nautil.us

73 pointsAnon8444 comments

Here's the paper:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/

Towle I. Clades, Grades, and the Genus Problem: A Case for Revising Hominin Taxonomy. Am J Biol Anthropol. 2026 Aug;190(4):e70344. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.70344. PMID: 42612121; PMCID: PMC13485234.

I know its petty, but I find it annoying you didn't link to the actual paper instead of the NLM copy.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.70344

To me, the choices of names for clades seem like madness:

All apes (superfamily): Hominoidea; great apes (family): Hominidae; African great apes (subfamily): Homininae; Pan‐Homo clade (tribe): Hominini; human clade (subtribe): Hominina. [0]

The potential for error seems enormous, and also imagine speaking those words without creating confusion, or try forming singulars and possessives that, in text and speech, unambiguously identify the clade.

Can anyone on the inside shed insight on why they do this to themselves, and to everyone else who has even less understanding? Is it self-hate? Imagine a large codebase that named variables like that - there would be a lynching late one night when the bug was found to be confusion.

Despite my reaction, I guess there is some good reason that all these smart, experienced people make this choice.

[0] From the paper the OP describes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/

Homie, no idea.

[Sorry I never joke but surely the biologists were joking when they came up with that so it should be fair game]

If we're joking:

A Roman walks into a bar and says, "Can I have a martinus?"

The bartender asks, "Don't you mean a martini?"

The Roman responds, "If I wanted a double, I would have asked for it."

I become (irrationally?) annoyed when I find "cannoli" listed on a menu, especially at an Italian restaurant where they should know better, and it's a single cannolo.

maybe the idea is you get one of the many prepared

In the list, 'cannoli' means they have cannoli; 'cannolo' means they serve a cannolo.

That's just the established naming convention. For brown bears, you have parvorder Ursida, superfamily Ursoidea, family Ursidae, subfamily Ursinae, tribe Ursini, genus Ursus, and finally species Ursus arctos. When there are millions of taxonomic names, you want to establish some kind of regular structure, because you are going to run out of useful distinctive names.

> and finally species Ursus arctos

What happened there? The normal thing would be for the species name to be identical with the genus name, but as far as I can tell Ursus ursus doesn't refer to anything. Why break into Greek?

Ask Linnaeus? Wikipedia has a picture of Linnaeus's 1735 taxonomy [1] giving what I think is Ursus ursus, Ursus coati, and Ursus wickhead, and the 10th edition in 1758 has Ursus arctos, Ursus luscus, Ursus meles, and Ursus lotor.

I don't know when it changed between the 1st and 10th editions, or why, and trying to read Latin taxonomical texts with many abbreviations makes my head hurt.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Linnaeus...

> I don't know when it changed between the 1st and 10th editions

If we're talking about Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, quite a bit: Binomial nomenclature wasn't included until the 10th edition, for example. And from an prominent 2015 paper [0]:

"In modern-day classifications, the starting point for botanical names is Linnaeus' Species Plantarum and for zoological names it is the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae."

[0] Michael A. Ruggiero, Dennis P. Gordon, et al. A Higher Level Classification of All Living Organisms. PloS One. (April 2015) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... (see also this correction: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... )

I'm amused that Linnaeus put a joke into the table.

The characteres generum column entry for Homo is Nosce te ipsum, "know thyself".

The scan is at a very low resolution for such a significant document. :(

> The normal thing would be for the species name to be identical with the genus name

What does this mean? Most species names differ from their genus name, for example Homo sapiens. But I suspect I misunderstand you.

Binomial nomenclature, the standard that was developed by Linnaeus (in the 10th edition cited by jcranmer), is Genus species, with the genus always capitalized and the species always plural - in case that is somehow relevant.

> Most species names differ from their genus name, for example Homo sapiens. But I suspect I misunderstand you.

A genus is typically named after a species. That species retains its name as the species name, and gets it again as the genus name.

So, for example, the Latin word for "toad" is bufo, and the name Bufo bufo went to the species that was considered the most standard, toadiest toad, which wikipedia still calls the "common toad" today. More exotic toads will be called Bufo [something weird].

Ursus arctos clearly has the same form; it's the Latin word for "bear" followed by... the Greek word for "bear". The normal thing would have been to name this species, the prototype for all bears, Ursus ursus.

Homo sapiens is a special case where we specifically wanted to say something nice about the species.

I agree, but it is clear they got used to it. I suppose once you learn the endings, you can generate the higher genera from the name of a bottom level species familar to us like human-cat-dog / homo-felis-canis

Superfamily -oidea

  Hominoidea | Feloidea | Canoidea |

Family -idae

  Hominidae | Felidae | Canidae |

Subfamily -inae

  Homininae | Felinae (Small cats) | Caninae |

Tribe -ini

  Hominini | Felini | Canini |

Subtribe -ina

  Hominina | Felina | Canina |

Honestly, you get used to it. I find hierarchial binomial/trinomial naming system used in biology a lot more clear than the TLAs so common in engineering. Half of the terms are pretty uncommon as well.

Clearly Homo idiotensis here is incapable of cultivating a factual ontology that would place it below the 'great apes' as the type species amongst amongst the 'asshole apes'.

Research is coming out specifically regarding the COVID genome which suggests missing sequence data was routinely filled in from baseline reference sequences. In turn, the reference sequences suggest during later analysis constant reversion back to the baseline. These gaps are the (dot) product of limitations of PCR * computer processing algorithms. No reason to believe the problem is limited to COVID.

Does this explain the conspiracy theories about “insertions”? When I looked into it, many other virus species had similar “insertions” - the problem seeming to be the sequencing itself not being accurate (as opposed to every viral disease being cooked up in a lab for the last 5,000 years)

A conspiracy theorist misuse a term with no knowledge of it's context? Nahhh never /s

I haven't heard anything about this, could you drop a couple references?

I wonder if these are what was being referenced: [1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11092452/ [2]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-025-02932-8

ChatGPT helped me identify likely articles: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a8a7e1c82308191be82762907a607de

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