The reporting in this story left untouched some details I wanted to see follow-up on, so I decided to look at some other journalistic and blogger accounts on the same newly published research report. Brian Switek's story on National Geographic
quotes an expert who sums up what the real issue is here:
"The finding likely won't change expert's views on species diversity, where two groups are heavily entrenched said William Harcourt-Smith, an assistant professor at Lehman College and a research associate in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology.
"Some, nicknamed 'splitters,' see the tree of evolution as having many species. Others, called 'lumpers,' see wider species categories and fewer limbs on the tree.
"'To be honest it just adds some important fuel to the debate,' Harcourt-Smith wrote in an e-mail. 'The lumpers, of course, will love this new paper, but I can see splitters saying that there is too much variation in both the African early Homo and Dmanisi sample for them to all be Homo erectus.'"
> splitters make very small units – their critics say that if they can tell two animals apart, they place them in different genera … and if they cannot tell them apart, they place them in different species. … Lumpers make large units – their critics say that if a carnivore is neither a dog nor a bear, they call it a cat.
In a TED talk about dinosaurs[1], Jack Horner claims that many dinosaur species are probably the same specimen at a different stage of development (baby, child, adult), but that paleontologists have classified them as separate partially because they had no way of telling at what stage of development a fossil is (for which he has a solution, which is looking at the inner structure of the fossilized bone), but also partially because every paleontologist wants to discover his or her own dinosaur.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131017-skull...
is quite helpful and has interesting graphics.
The BBC story
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24564375
looks to be more helpful than the story kindly submitted here, the CNN story
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/17/world/europe/ancient-skull...
quotes other experts who don't reach the same conclusions, while the Wall Street Journal story
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230438410...
largely quotes scholars who agree with the new announcement from Georgia.
The Bloomberg story
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-skulls...
quotes an expert who sums up what the real issue is here:
"The finding likely won't change expert's views on species diversity, where two groups are heavily entrenched said William Harcourt-Smith, an assistant professor at Lehman College and a research associate in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology.
"Some, nicknamed 'splitters,' see the tree of evolution as having many species. Others, called 'lumpers,' see wider species categories and fewer limbs on the tree.
"'To be honest it just adds some important fuel to the debate,' Harcourt-Smith wrote in an e-mail. 'The lumpers, of course, will love this new paper, but I can see splitters saying that there is too much variation in both the African early Homo and Dmanisi sample for them to all be Homo erectus.'"