Yes I have their pages bookmarked too. They keep adding material and revising to keep as up to date as possible, so it is good in that regard too.
How do you see this discovery shuffling the usual suspects? Did Homo rudolfensis just became the prime suspect in the Homo ergaster paternity suit, or is habilus in it as much as ever?
The handprint site (my link above) has it as rudolfensis, while the Smithsonian tree has it as habilis or rudolfensis:
http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/a_tree.html
quote:
A phylogenetic tree is a graphical means to depict the evolutionary relationships of a group of organisms. The phylogenetic tree below shows one reconstruction of the relationships among early human species, as we best know them today. It is a clickable image map. To go to a species page, click on the bar below the species name, or you can choose from the text links below. The question marks in red signify debated phylogenetic (ancestor/descendent) relationships of early humans. Click on these to view a page detailing the debate.
See the website for the hypertext linked version of the graphic.
Their page on the debated phylogenetic relationships for Homo ergaster talks of this specific debate (which precedes these finds):
http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/habdebate.html
quote:
Originally, both were assigned to the species Homo habilis, with ER 1470 thought of as male and the smaller ER 1813 a female in a strongly dimorphic species. However, the anatomies of the two skulls differ considerably.
One debate in paleoanthropology today is whether or not ER 1470, and several other fossils previously identified as H. habilis, should be grouped into a new species, Homo rudolfensis. This classification would acknowledge that ER 1470 and the other members of Homo rudolfensis differ more from Homo habilis, sensu stricto ("in the strict sense," meaning: as originally defined), than could possibly be accounted for by variation within a population or between sexes. This would place two species of the genus Homo in Africa during the same time period in addition to two members of the genus Paranthropus, and, possibly, late surviving members of the species Australopithecus africanus. Far more complicated than the original neat, linear model.
Certainly it is logical that there were many subpopulations of hominids moving into new ecological areas, and this could cause some speciation events. When you read Mayr on peripheral isolates leading to speciation you get the feeling that there could have been a lot of experimentation going on back then with a number of different ecologies being explored (though Mayr lumped most hominids into one or two species).
Such peripheral isolates could evolve into new species while the main population still carried on, so yes it could go either way. This of course brings up the question of rates of change in new ecological situations compared to old ones (faster? same?). One of the keys here is the difference in diet noted in the article, as that is a clue on the difference in ecologies between the two species -- if we can get the same info on rudolfensis and ergaster that would be a further clue (but there are much fewer specimens yet). Think ecological and behavioral isolation rather than just geographic isolation.
My feeling is that the ancestral tree will get more branches as we get more fossil finds. Species
will continue after branching (if we evolved from x why are x still around ...) and this may make a final answer messy.
Enjoy.
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