Chris Stringer : What is Homo sapiens?

The Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity is happy to announce a series of free webinars for Spring 2021 on Human origins and cultural evolution: Celebrating the 150th anniversary of The Descent of Man. http://www.dysoc.org/dom_webinars​ Speaker: Chris Stringer (Human Evolution, Natural History Museum, London, UK) Date: 11:45 a.m. EST Tuesday, February 23, 2021 Abstract: The species name Homo sapiens has at times been applied to a variety of early humans, including the Neanderthals, and this was still the case when I began my PhD in 1970. However, at about that time, the American anthropologist William Howells started to use the term 'anatomically modern man' to distinguish recent humans and their close relatives in the fossil record from ancient people like the Neanderthals, who did not show all the skeletal characteristics of recent humans. Since then, the updated term 'anatomically modern human' has often been shortened to just 'modern human', and this has usually been synonymised with a more restricted usage of Homo sapiens to exclude people like the Neanderthals. In my talk I will try to disentangle the different usages of 'modern human' and Homo sapiens, when applied to the fossil record and also look briefly at what might make modern humans different behaviourally.