The Science of Being Human

But evolution is not a process of increasing complexity, nor any other measure of superiority you can find.

Our genus Homo contains just one species at the moment, and that’s us

none of us is an island and we all live out our lives surrounded by other humans.

and to my mind there is nothing more fascinating than the science of being human.

he system was invented back in 1735 by one of the great scientists of the eighteenth century, a Swedish naturalist called Carl Linnaeus

the humble and dull-looking lymphocytes turned out to be at the heart of the system. Not only that, there are three distinct flavours of lymphocyte: the B-cells make antibodies, the T-cells identify foreign agents in our bodies and the natural killer cells seek out and destroy our own cells that have become infected with viruses.

more nuanced as biological science has progressed. It has become apparent that the idea that each species is a distinct entity is merely a product of our own desires to categorise the organisms we find into neat boxes. Linnaeus created a system to help botanists and we have become stuck in his thought pattern ever since. All of which leads to paradoxical nonsense like ring species. You may assume that much of this only pertains to other organisms out there in the big wide world as after all, humans belong to a genus of only one species. Within the Homo genus there is only the sapiens species. But it was not always so.

and plants are now divided into the kingdom of Chromista, where you find the algae and seaweeds, and the kingdom of Plantae, where trees and grass and such can be found. Lastly is our own place, in the kingdom of Animalia.

, we see the rise of genuinely distinct early humans from about 800,000 to 400,000 years ago. This is the age of Homo heidelbergensis, a species named after a fossil jaw discovered in 1907 by Daniel Hartmann,

This series of five skulls showed a wide range of features that would appear to point to a number of different species being present, including Homo habilis, Homo erectus and even a couple of less well-known species, such as Homo ergaster and Homo rudolfensis. Yet the skulls were all found in the same place and are all of the same age,