page_title: Human taxonomy
section_title: Homo sapiens subspecies
hierarchical_section_title: Human taxonomy / Subspecies / Homo sapiens subspecies
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Schilderij van Martin Hoffman toont Linnaeus in zijn Lapse kostuum, met het Linnaeusklokje in de hand. De tekst CAROLUS LINNAEUS e Lapponia Redux Aetat. 30 anno 1737 op de trommel in het origineel in Museum Boerhaave ontbreekt hier.English: Painting showing Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) in his Lapland costume. In his hand is the plant that Jan Frederik Gronovius named after him: Linnaea borealis. The text CAROLUS LINNAEUS e Lapponia Redux Aetat. 30 anno 1737 on the drum on the original in the Museum Boerhaave is missing here.
context_page_description: Human taxonomy is the classification of the human species within zoological taxonomy. The systematic genus, Homo, is designed to include both anatomically modern humans and extinct varieties of archaic humans. Current humans have been designated as subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, differentiated according to some from the direct ancestor, Homo sapiens idaltu.
  Since the introduction of systematic names in the 18th century, knowledge of human evolution has increased drastically, and a number of intermediate taxa have been proposed in the 20th to early 21st century. The most widely accepted taxonomy groups takes the genus Homo as originating between two and three million years ago, divided into at least two species, archaic Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens, with about a dozen further suggestions for species without universal recognition.
  The genus Homo is placed in the tribe Hominini alongside Pan. The two genera are estimated to have diverged over an extended time of hybridization spanning roughly 10 to 6 million years ago, with possible admixture as late as 4 million years ago.
context_section_description: The recognition or nonrecognition of subspecies of Homo sapiens has a complicated history. The rank of subspecies in zoology is introduced for convenience, and not by objective criteria,  based on pragmatic consideration of factors such as geographic isolation and sexual selection. The informal taxonomic rank of race is variously considered equivalent or subordinate to the rank of subspecies, and the division of anatomically modern humans (H. sapiens) into subspecies is closely tied to the recognition of major racial groupings based on human genetic variation.
  A subspecies cannot be recognized independently: a species will either be recognized as having no subspecies at all or at least two (including any that are extinct). Therefore, the designation of an extant subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens  only makes sense if at least one other subspecies is recognized. H. s. sapiens is attributed to "Linnaeus (1758)" by the taxonomic Principle of Coordination. William Stearn (1959) in a "passing remark" argued that  Linnaeus "must stand as the type of his Homo sapiens". Since Linnaeus describes H. s. europaeus as having blue/green (caerulus) eyes but himself had brown eyes, he cannot have included himself in H. s. europaeus, Linnaeus would therefore have to be classified as H. sapiens sapiens, as not matching any of the descriptions of his five subspecies, and so would stand as the lectotype both for H. sapiens, and for H. s. sapiens within his own subspecies nomenclature.
  During the 19th to mid-20th century, it was common practice to classify the major divisions of extant H. sapiens as subspecies, following Linnaeus (1758), who had recognized H. s. americanus, H. s. europaeus, H. s. asiaticus and H. s. afer as grouping the native populations of the Americas, West Eurasia, East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, respectively, besides H. s. ferus (for the "wild" form which he identified with feral children) and two further "wild" forms for reported specimens now considered part of cryptozoology, H. s. monstrosus and H. s. troglodytes.
  There were variations and additions to the categories of Linnaeus,  such as H. s. tasmanianus for the native population of Australia. Bory de St. Vincent in his Essai sur l'Homme (1825) extended Linné's "racial" categories to  as many as fifteen: Leiotrichi ("smooth-haired"): japeticus (with subraces), arabicus, indicus,  scythicus,  sinicus, hyperboreus, neptunianus, australasicus, columbicus, americanus, patagonicus; Oulotrichi ("crisp-haired"): aethiopicus,  cafer, hottentotus, melaninus. Similarly, Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1899) also had categories based on race, such as priscus, spelaeus (etc.).
  Homo sapiens neanderthalensis was proposed by King (1864) as an alternative to Homo neanderthalensis. There have been "taxonomic wars" over whether Neanderthals were a separate species since their discovery in the 1860s. Pääbo (2014) frames this as a debate that is unresolvable in principle, "since there is no definition of species perfectly describing the case." Louis Lartet (1869) proposed Homo sapiens fossilis based on the Cro-Magnon fossils.
  There are a number of proposals of extinct varieties of Homo sapiens made in the 20th century. Many of the original proposals were not using explicit trinomial nomenclature, even though they are still cited as valid synonyms of H. sapiens by Wilson & Reeder (2005). These include:  Homo grimaldii (Lapouge, 1906),
  Homo aurignacensis hauseri (Klaatsch & Hauser, 1910),
  Notanthropus eurafricanus (Sergi, 1911), 
  Homo fossilis infrasp. proto-aethiopicus (Giuffrida-Ruggeri, 1915),
  Telanthropus capensis (Broom, 1917),Homo wadjakensis (Dubois, 1921), 
  Homo sapiens cro-magnonensis, Homo sapiens grimaldiensis (Gregory, 1921),
  Homo drennani (Kleinschmidt, 1931),Homo galilensis (Joleaud, 1931) = Paleanthropus palestinus (McCown & Keith, 1932).
  Rightmire (1983) proposed  Homo sapiens rhodesiensis.
  By the 1980s, the practice of dividing extant populations of Homo sapiens into subspecies declined. An early authority explicitly avoiding the division of H. sapiens into subspecies was Grz
caption: 1737 painting of Carl von Linné wearing a traditional Sami costume. Linnaeus is sometimes named as the lectotype of both H. sapiens and H. s. sapiens.[39]
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