Science just published another paper on archaic admixture, Excavating Neandertal and Denisovan DNA from the genomes of Melanesian individuals. It’s open access, so you should read it. And really, you should read the supplements. The paper is fine enough, but the space limitations are a real bummer here.
But what I want to talk about is Carl Zimmer’s write-up in The New York Times, Ancestors of Modern Humans Interbred With Extinct Hominins, Study Finds. It’s good, I have no quibbles with Carl’s journalism. I am just perplexed at the title (which he’s not responsible for). Why would you say “hominins” instead of humans? Because that’s what these distant lineages, which contributed some ancestry to our own, were, by any reasonable definition.
I have not given much thought to animal experimentation, though I am not comfortable personally with research on apes (I did read The Great Ape Project). I would definitely oppose research on sister hominin lineages if they were to be discovered alive in some obscure and isolated location, because they are human, even if they are different. There is some ambiguity in the science journalism right now as to what is or isn’t a human from what I can tell by the constant semantic fluidity. Often you finesse the issue by stating “modern human.” I think that’s fine. But we need to seriously think about collapsing the semantic distinction between these diverse lineages when it comes to their human status. Humanity as a characteristic is an ancestral trait of the hominin lineage, not a derived one.
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