Talk:Homininae

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Terminology

To the anon who keeps changing the terminology:

Taxon	Noun	Adjective
Hominoidea	hominoid	hominoidal
Hominidae	hominid	hominide
Homininae	hominin	hominine
Hominini	none

These are the definitions we are using. Scientists mix and match, depending usually on when they started using the various terms. "Hominoid" used to mean what "hominid" now means. "Hominin" used to mean what "hominid" now means. These terms have shifted meaning as our understanding of the taxonomic relationships have changed. See ape for the history of this understanding. Perhaps we can work on how to put this explanation into an article. - UtherSRG

Note that there is another terminology, in which the term "hominin" refers to Tribe hominini and the term "hominine" refers to Subfamily homininae. See the resource below for more information.
YEARBOOK OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 41:93-136 (1998) (available at http://www.indiana.edu/~origins/X-PDF/Potts98.pdf; http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Hominoids.html; http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/1204_hominin_id.html; http://encarta.msn.com; http://www.ecotao.com/holism/glosfn.htm; and so on. - 133.1.171.228

Google searching shows me that there is variety in the usage. Most scientific literature will note how each term is used and why. I have done so here. Also, please sign your comments with ~~~~ - UtherSRG 12:17, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)

I am not the anon who keeps changing things, but this is my understanding, as an amateur who reads about this stuff, of the terms conventionally used these days in English:

Taxon	Noun	Adjective
Hominoidea	hominoid	hominoid
Hominidae	hominid	hominid
Homininae	hominine	hominine
Hominini	hominin	hominin

I have never seen "hominide" in an English-language text, by the way. Take a look in Google, in the first five or six pages of results I don't see anything in English for hominide, maybe I'm missing something. --Cam 20:43, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

The thing is that *all* -idae ending taxa use -id and -ide, and *all* -inae ending taxa use -in and -ine. Some authors use the adjectival form as a noun, because in English that's also proper grammar. (Think: There's many blue and red balls. Get me a blue.) - UtherSRG 22:13, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

• I maintain that the ending "-ide" is not used by English-speaking biologists in relation to naming -idae. --Cam 15:45, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

I edited the article with a link to the National Geographic Style Manual (see their entry on "hominid, hominin"). If you change it back please cite an English-language source which explicitly states that "hominin" means a member of Homininae. (I know of course that any species in Hominini is automatically in Homininae. What I am looking for is a cite showing that "hominin" can mean anything in Homininae and not just in Hominini.) --Cam 16:00, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)

It's a matter of what taxa are used. Before Hominini was used at all, then my original usage applies. "Hominin" didn't come into usage at the time of introducing Hominini, but it did when Homininae was used. With the exception of this article Hominini isn't used. (Groves doesn't use Hominini, and our taxonomy is following his work.) Googling for "hominin" gives mixed results for its use, and when Hominini isn't used, "hominin" refers to Homininae. - UtherSRG 16:36, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)

Sorry about the edit war this morning. I was pretty convinced by that National Geographic link, and by some other reading I did last night and today, that the terms in that paragraph are the standard ones used. And they appear to be independent of what one puts in the taxa. That is, whatever you decide to put in Homininae, it's called a hominine. We could decide to put orangutans in there, then they'd be hominines. Similarly with Hominidae/hominid, Hominini/hominin etc. Whatever you put in those groups, they get called by the corresponding term. --Cam 04:21, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)

Leave it to the rigors of classification junkies to throw English gramar to the wind. ;) Ah well. No harm, no fowl. - UtherSRG 04:34, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that "hominid" and "hominin" are in flux in the professional literature at the moment because of changes in our understanding of the great ape family tree. The latest word from our primatologist (I'm an anthropology grad student at Florida State) is that hominin is commonly accepted as a term for H. sapiens and all ancestors since the Pan/Homo speciation event. A review of recent articles from the American Journal of Physical Anthropology shows precisely this trend. Thus, hominin would include Homo sp., Australopithecus sp., Paranthropus sp., and whatever your other prefered post-Pan human ancestor taxa are. "Hominid" is being avoided at the moment because of the confusion, but properly refers to (for living taxa) H. sapiens, Pan sp., Gorilla sp., and possibly Pongo sp. Some primatologists include Pongo sp. in Hominidae, some retain Pongidae for Pongo sp. alone.

I didn't make the edit myself because clearly this is a contentious topic, and I'm an archaeologist, not a primatologist, but that's the 2 cents from the anthropological community.- suncrush

It's all hogwash catagorization anyway. We know that genetically H. sapiens sapiens are closely related enough to P. paniscus to be considered two races in the same species. (Of course, this hasn't been confirmed by generating viable offspring.) The addition of the Tribe Hominin is simple an effort to keep those who don't understand genetics from rioting and taking away our grant money. ~grumble grumble~ --Dustin Asby 23:48, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

That seems likely to be an exaggeration, alternatively it is very interesting. There are rumours of attempts to hybridise, the more systematic ones made by sapiens. Midgley 02:26, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Move chimpanzees and bonobos to Gorillini. Only humans (fossil and living) should be classified as hominine See [1] Trtsmb 02:58, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Wrong. Pan is more closely related to Homo than it is to Gorilla. Putting Pan in Gorillini would say just the oppostie, that Pan is more closely related to Gorilla. - UtherSRG (talk) 03:01, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm certainly no expert in these fields of science. And please someone correct me if I am wrong, but I have yet to hear of any real evolutionary connection between man and apes. In fact, hasn't there been DNA tests already that show a striking difference between the two families? So I ask: is it really appropriate to place "Homo" on this family tree? I really do not know for sure. Insaneman 16:14, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

You are wrong. This is NOT a forum for a general discussion of the topic. I shouldn't post this, but I am always amazed at the ability of someone with virtually no knowledge of the subject to HAVE an opinion on the subject. It is human nature, it seems. OTOH, the fossil evidence in human ancestry is almost non-existent. Almost but not quite. You comment about "striking difference", which is meaningless as far as I can see. The similarities between us and the other homininae are what is "striking". The relationship between physiology and dna is well established, but the relationship between ecological niche and dna is only "weak" at best. (some snakes live in trees, for example). The fact that we share so many similarities between our ~20,000 genes and a gorilla's would not be obvious just because of our general size, shape, habitat, and diet. The similarities are extremely implausible as coincidence, rather they must have a cause, we think. The theory of evolution and the fossil record give us a plausible (if not yet complete) explanation: We are very closely related to them. Again, OTOH, be very cautious of anyone spouting percentage dna sharing/similarity numbers. These numbers are not absolute (in fact, there is no single "standard method" to determine them, let alone an absolute method). Mixing and matching these numbers will lead you astray. (See Uther's nonsense below). (look at any one % as a single question on a test; it takes many questions to determine the actual "correct" score.)Abitslow (talk) 19:21, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Um... have you read any of the related articles? Humans and chimps are more closely related to each other (sharing 95-98% of our DNA) than chimps are to gorillas. Gorillas and humans also share a large percentage of the genome, at about 93-96%. It doesn't take an expert to read the chimpanzee and gorilla articles. - UtherSRG (talk) 17:52, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

There must be some appropriate term for species on the human side of the human/chimp split (ie Homo, Australopithecus and Paranthropus but not Pan). There is actually lots of variation in how much of the genome different species are deemed to share depending on how you measure (between humans and chimpanzees, total absence of genes in one present in the other is less than 2 percent, while differences in number of repetitions make the chimpanzee genome 10% longer than the human genome and 20% of the human genome are viruses absorbed 2.5-2.0 million years ago, the latter referenced from the documentary Dr. Virus and Mr. Hyde), and studies of evolution under environmental stress show that environmental change drastically increases the percentage of the mutations that appear are allowed to live on by evolution, compared to stable environments, which can fool the molecular clock. But that humans and other apes share a common ancestor, and closer than that with other, non-ape organisms, is still indisputable (while what ape species is our closest cousin can be debated). Hybridization attempts were indeed made in what was then Soviet in the 1930s by a scientist named Ivanov. His goal was to create a missing link and use it to disprove christianity. He got money to the project from lower officials, but not from Stalin himself. He first tried inseminating chimpanzee females with human sperm, and later tried to inseminate human females with orangutan sperm. No success were reported, and if it was successful, it would have been such spectacular news that no censorship in the world could ever have hushed it down, proving that the attempts simply failed, uncertain if by fundamental impossibility or mere accident. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.58.158.198 (talk) 19:52, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Hominine

This term already redirects to this article and I can see it listed as referring to Homininae (perhaps because it has an 'e' at the end?) so I added it in bold as an alt term like corresponding articles do. Y12J (talk) 23:55, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Humans rather than Homo sapiens

It seems frivolous to refer to humans by their scientific name in the introduction whilst gorillas and chimpanzees both are not. I've changed it, but I know how things like that can be blown out of proportion on Wp, so in an effort to avoid a possible edit war any discrepancies in opinion can be discussed here. 122.106.203.169 (talk) 10:30, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Not a problem. - UtherSRG (talk) 11:56, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Rewrite has added personal bias

The expansion by User:P'tit Pierre seems to have been driven by a personal point of view, e.g. the ancestry of Paranthropus to Gorillas. The article as it stands is severely inbalanced and lacks many citations. Wording like "Mainstream views on Australopithecines evolution can be found in the "human evolution" page" also makes it seem that this article is serving as a WP:POVFORK of Human evolution rather than a summary of this taxonomic group. Fences&Windows 01:02, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I have directly interacted with this user regarding their edits to this page (as can be seen on our respective talk pages). The user states/claims that they are a geneticist, but is not a native English speaker and doesn't seem to understand wiki syntax, formatting etc. From what I can tell the language barrier is the biggest problem - they certainly seem to be working in good faith but don't necessarily understand all the rules or the implications of their words. I thought myself that material being added was not entirely wiki-worthy (not only because of the use of English), but given my background wasn't sure in what way; I didn't know if it was the current scientific consensus worded (improperly) as "truth" or if it was just one view that the user supported. I think this user has a lot to contribute, but probably needs some direction as to how Wikipedia works with regard to NPOV. In this regard, the "un-disclaimered" H. sapiens neanderthalensis (rather than H. neanderthalensis) was a bit of a red flag, but not being qualified in this area I couldn't really "neutralise" it properly. I have tried to give as much instruction as I can in other fields (mainly relating to the manual of style), but as I'm not in a position to judge I didn't think it right to insert "some scientists think" or similar before it (it may have implied doubt where there was none within the scientific community).

With regard to the specific edits made by this user, I would suggest that finding ways to incorporate them as one scientific opinion would be the preferable solution, rather than simply removing them. This may be as simple as adding "one theory/hypothesis is…" to the beginning of sections they have written, or may be more complex, but I think you probably know what I mean.

Alphathon /'æɫfə.θɒn/ ^(talk) 02:52, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

It seems contradictory to say that I am only expressing my POV, and in the next sentence to consider incorrect that I wrote: "Mainstream views on Australopithecines evolution can be found in the "human evolution" page". It is not a POV fork of Human evolution because it also discusses gorilla and chimpanzee evolution. On the contrary, the article shows how closely related are the histories of humans, gorillas and chimpanzees, extant members of the Homininae. P'tit Pierre P'tit Pierre (talk) 20:13, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I have re-worded the section on the comparison of paranthropus and gorillas, removing most of the height and weight numbers. I have added a description of Paranthropus main characteristics, namely the sagittal crest and heavy chewing apparatus (one supporting the other) and strong sexual dimorphism. It is really half of the description of the tight relations between the 3 evolutionary lines leading to humans, chimpanzees and gorillas. If you favour another conclusion why don’t you write it down? P’tit Pierre P'tit Pierre (talk) 09:33, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

May I add 2 citations about Paranthropus:

1. Research published in Science journal (Nov.30, 2007) shows that some of our closest extinct relatives had more in common with gorillas than previously thought. Dr Charles Lockwood, UCL Department of Anthropology and lead author of the study, said: "When we examined fossils from 1.5 to 2 million years ago we found that in one of our close relatives (P. robustus) the males continued to grow well into adulthood, just as they do in gorillas.
2. University College London anthropologist Charles Lockwood determined that P. robustus males continued to grow well into adulthood, long after females stopped developing. In a paper published today in Science, Lockwood surmises that P. robustus groups lived much as great apes do now, with a single enormous male dominating a harem of small females.

Thanks! P'tit Pierre P'tit Pierre (talk) 17:04, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm returning from a long wikivacation, so while I'm a not new to the subject, there has been a lot of changes to this article since I left. Although I'm fascinated by the theories that P'tit Pierre espouses, this article is giving undue weight to one particular view point. Most of the discussion of human evolution belongs on the article of that subject. I'm going to significantly cut away large portions of this article to bring it back to something with no POV pushing. What I cut can be restored if other (more mainstream) points of view are included. - UtherSRG (talk) 11:00, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

This discussion has ended a long time ago. Is this issue resolved? I will remove the tag from the article in 7 days, unless there is any more discussion about NPOV. Timothy G. ^{from CA} (talk) 21:51, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Obsolete - needs a rewrite

Early into this article, reference to Pongidae occurs. Clicking on the link informs me that Pongidae is OBSOLETE. In other words the basic structure of this article is 'wrong' (no longer current thinking, current fashion). I also note that several graphics also are, therefore, obsolete (or contentious/misleading). I note that this may be Wikipedia's downfall - that articles once written tend NOT to change with the times (original authors are probably not willing to admit that time has moved on, or are not willing to invest the substantial effort and time to keep article current). Call it "information inertia". Its real. (sure to some extent it is fashion, but on the other hand, even if every 'improvement' might someday be reverted, it is not a reason to think progress can't/shouldn't be made.) This article needs a rewrite, imho. (Even if it is simply to say that new evidence has cast doubt (or new analysis of old evidence), and there are now several alternatives each having strong and weak points. The amazingly sparse evidence from which hypotheses are made and facts "concluded" astounds me. To call any of it "established" science is ridiculous. It may be the best evidence we have, but if tomorrow 75 anatomically modern human fossils are found dating from 500,000 to 670,000 years ago (with suitable verification and validation), then we'll toss almost all of the current ideas out the window. Constrast this to the 'hard sciences' where, e.g., quantum mechanics did not (could not) refute acid/base theory.Abitslow (talk) 18:03, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Diagram

The diagram includes Pan in the hominini whereas the wikipage defining the hominini excludes Pan from that clade. They cannot both be right.

There is an RFC that may affect this page

There is an RFC that may affect this page at WikiProject Tree of Life. The topic is Confusion over taxonomy of subtribe Panina and taxon homininae (are chimps hominins)?

Please feel free to comment there. SPACKlick (talk) 16:38, 20 March 2015 (UTC)