Paleospecies as cognitive construct: The meme of “Homo floresiensis”

Abstract

Creation and subsequent abandonment of a number of earlier species considered human ancestors: Eoanthropus dawsoni, Hesperopithecus haroldcooki, Homo gardarensis and Ramapithecus punjabicus is presented using cases from the history of science. This review indicates that the fossil evidence for these species has been questionable from the beginning but that mental images – memes – they invoked were attractive to students of human evolution and as such persisted even if not confirmed by further finds, with new research still being disputed. Against this background the status of the recent construction of the hominin species “Homo floresiensis” is discussed showing that despite dubious interpretations of the objective data and a relatively long time of non-confirmation due to paucity of newly discovered skeletal remains, the “species” still exists in minds of scholars and in the scientific literature extending into textbooks.

Human mitochondrial DNA diversity is compatible with the multiregional continuity theory of the origin of Homo sapiens

“…Results in the paper were reported by me at several international meetings and were well received. However, shortly afterward, my major academic shift between Departments and Colleges at Penn State gave rise to much new work, research opportunities, and graduate students with different foci, so the paper languished until the revolution in human evolutionary frameworks (Bednarik 2015) that has helped to provide a framework for questioning intensely the validity of some previously accepted hominin taxa (Eckhardt and Henneberg 2021), with this skepticism increasingly being confirmed, as by recent fossil finds in the 300,000 year bp range (Wu et al 2019) that now make the original relatively recent "Out of Africa" replacement as clearly naïve to some others now as it was to me then.…”