Early Hominids and Cranial Capacities (continued)

Abstract

I SHOULD like to make a few points arising from the previous letter¹. Much of the debate centres around the problem of species in palaeontology; how to define these, and how to assign new specimens to their appropriate taxon². It is obvious that “the specimens representing the species make up the statistical universe”. The point which Wolpoff ignores is the manner in which individual specimens are assigned to “species”. In classifying fossils, due attention must be paid to variation within and between infraspecific populations, as well as to possible variation due to time². The most important issue to decide in the evaluation of a new find is the species lineage (that is, a sequence of ancestral/descendant species populations) to which it belongs, and this requires some consideration of position with respect to infraspecific lineages (infraspecific lineages being sequences of ancestral/descendant infraspecific populations which are not isolated from others but which do have some time duration). Only when this decision has been made ought attention to be turned to classification at the species level, that is, to dividing up the evolving continuum and giving the arbitrary divisions binomina.