Another argument for basing racial/subspecies taxonomy classification on archaic hominin DNA. We have that ability now. We didn't have it prior to 2010. Listen up people, it's rather easy: Euros have Neanderthal; Asians, Oceanians have Denisovan; Afros have Australopithecines
The quote is from a Chinese Twitter. I already knew the first two things but always heard that Africans carry genes from a mysterious, unknown hominin. This is the first time I see this mysterious animal named. What, who are the Australopithecines? The wiki says
"Australopithecina or Hominina is a subtribe in the tribe Hominini. The members of the subtribe are the extinct, close relatives of humans and, with the extant genus Homo, comprise the human clade. While none of the groups normally directly assigned to this group survived, the australopiths do not appear to be literally extinct (in the sense of having no living descendants.)"
Clear, it is not. Even I could not make it more obscure and confusing. Didn't you say they were extinct? If they are not extinct, they must be alive. If they are alive, where are they? Who are they? Apparently, no one dares to identify them. Less than no one, me.
To make it more confusing, a pic illustrates the wiki article. The cute boy holding up a fossil is NOT a descendant nor a relative of the extinct/nonextinct Australopithecines. Stock Photo - corpus reconstruction of Lucy, female of the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis, living 3, 2 million years ago in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia, Moesgaard Museum (MOMU) (Henning Larsen Architects), a museum dedicated to archaeology and ethnography, located in Hojbjerg, a suburb of Aarhus, Jutland Peninsula, Denmark, Northern Europe.
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