JASs Proceeding Paper Journal of Anthropological Sciences Vol. 94 (2016), pp. 1-16 the JASs is published by the Istituto Italiano di Antropologia www.isita-org.com What constitutes Homo sapiens? Morphology versus received wisdom Jefrey H. Schwartz Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA e-mail: jhs@pitt.edu Summary - Although Linnaeus coined Homo sapiens in 1735, it was Blumenbach forty years later who provided the irst morphological deinition of the species. Since humans were not then allowed to be ante-Diluvian, his efort applied to the genus, as well. After the Feldhofer Grotto Neanderthal disproved this creationist notion, and human–fossil hunting became legitimate, new specimens were allocated either to sapiens or new species within Homo, or even to new species within new genera. Yet as these taxonomic acts relected the morphological diferences between specimens, they failed to address the question: What constitutes H. sapiens? When in 1950 Mayr collapsed all human fossils into Homo, he not only denied humans a diverse evolutionary past, he also shifted the key to identifying its species from morphology to geological age – a practice most paleoanthropologists still follow. hus, for example, H. erectus is the species that preceded H. sapiens, and H. sapiens is the species into which H. erectus morphed. In order to deal with a growing morass of morphologically dissimilar specimens, the non-taxonomic terms “archaic” (AS) and “anatomically modern” (AMS) were introduced to distinguish between the earlier and later versions of H. sapiens, thereby making the species impossible to deine. In attempting to disentangle fact from scenario, I begin from the beginning, trying to delineate features that may be distinctive of extant humans (ES), and then turning to the fossils that have been included in the species. With the exception of Upper Paleolithic humans – e.g. from Cro-Magnon, Dolni Vestonice, Mladeč – I argue that many specimens regarded as AMS, and all those deemed AS, are not H. sapiens. he features these AMS do share with ES suggest the existence of a sapiens clade. Further, restudy of near-recent fossils, especially from southwestern China (~11-14.5 ka), reinforces what discoveries such as H. loresiensis indicate: “If it’s recent, it’s not necessarily H. sapiens”. Keywords - Homo sapiens, Extant humans, “Archaic” versus “anatomically modern”, sapiens clade. Introduction In 1735 Linnaeus created the genus and spe- cies Homo sapiens, which he defined not mor- phologically, but with the phrase nosce te ipsum (know thyself ) (Linnaeus, 1735). Since desig- nating type specimens was not then required, Notton & Stringer (2010) are the most recent to argue that Linnaeus should be regarded as the lectotype of H. sapiens, and H. sapiens sapi- ens specifically. Their argument: Since Linnaeus described all races but H. s. sapiens, he saw himself as representative that group. Although making some sense of nosce te ipsum, this intrigu- ing proposal does not address defining sapiens much less Homo because, even if Linnaeus had described himself, he would have done so as with other races, in terms of geography, behavior, skin color, and hair type. Thus it fell upon Blumenbach (1969) to pro- vide the first morphological diagnosis of Homo sapiens. Although he believed he could identify races by different cranial shapes, he argued that they all belonged to H. sapiens, which he distin- guished from other mammals by such features as a chin, small jaws, small canines abutting small e-pub ahead of print doi 10.4436/jass.94028