General question here from a non geneticist/biologist/archaeologist/palaeontologist.
So they find a skull or a group of skulls that do not conform to our understanding of H. sapiens or other known hominids.
At what point and how do they decide that this represents a new species, and not a single or group of deformed H. sapiens?
Is it possible that this "new" species could be the remains of some kind of deformed or mutated already-known type?
Genuinely interested to know how they decide this given the scarcity of these specimens.