Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree

By Ian Towle, Research Fellow in Biological Anthropology, Monash University

Humanity’s family tree is long and tangled. Scientists sort our ancient relatives into three familiar groups: Homo, Australopithecus and Paranthropus.

Each of these is a “genus”, the rank just above a species. (In Homo sapiens, Homo is the genus and sapiens is the species.)

These names dominate how we talk about human origins. But new fossils, advances in genetic analysis, and more rigorous methods for figuring out who’s related to whom show these groupings don’t really reflect the true shape of our family tree.

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