In addition to the generally accepted taxonomic nameHomo sapiens (Latin: "sapient human", Linnaeus 1758), other Latin-based names for the human species have been created to refer to various aspects of the human character.
The Indo-European languages have a number of inherited terms for mankind. The etymon of man is found in the Germanic languages, and is cognate with Manu, the name of the human progenitor in Hindu mythology, and found in Indic terms for "man" (manuṣya, manush, manava etc.).
Latin homo is derived from an Indo-European root dʰǵʰm- "earth", as it were "earthling". It has cognates in Baltic (Old Prussian zmūi), Germanic (Gothic guma) and Celtic (Old Irish duine). This is comparable to the explanation given in the Genesis narrative to the Hebrew Adam (אָדָם) "man", derived from a word for "red, reddish-brown". Etymologically, it may be an ethnic or racial classification (after "reddish" skin colour contrasting with both "white" and "black"), but Genesis takes it to refer to the reddish colour of earth, as in the narrative the first man is formed from earth.[2]
Other Indo-European languages name man for his mortality, *mr̥tós meaning "mortal", so in Armenian mard, Persian mard, Sanskrit marta and Greek βροτός meaning "mortal; human". This is comparable to the Semitic word for "man", represented by Arabic insanإنسان (cognate with Hebrew ʼenōšאֱנוֹשׁ), from a root for "sick, mortal".[3] The Arabic word has been influential in the Islamic world, and was adopted in many Turkic languages. The native Turkic word is kiši.[4]
Greek ἄνθρωπος (anthropos) is of uncertain, possibly pre-Greek origin.[5] Slavic čelověkъ also is of uncertain etymology.[6]
The Chinese character used in East Asian languages is 人, originating as a pictogram of a human being. The reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation of the Chinese word is /ni[ŋ]/.[7] A Proto-Sino-Tibetan r-mi(j)-n gives rise to Old Chinese /*miŋ/, modern Chinese 民 mín "people" and to Tibetan མི mi "person, human being".
In some tribal or band societies, the local endonym is indistinguishable from the word for "men, human beings". Examples include Ainu: ainu, Inuktitut: inuk, Bantu: bantu, Khoekhoe: khoe-khoe (etc.), possibly in Uralic: Hungarianmagyar, Mansimäńćī, mańśi, from a Proto-Ugric *mańć- "man, person".
In philosophy
The mixture of serious and tongue-in-cheek self-designation originates with Plato, who on one hand defined man as it were taxonomically as "featherless biped"[8][9] and on the other as ζῷον πολιτικόνzōon politikon, as "political" or "state-building animal" (Aristotle's term, based on Plato's Statesman).
There is no consensus on the taxonomic delineation between human species, human subspecies and the human races. On the one hand, there is the proposal that H. sapiens idaltu (2003) is not distinctive enough to warrant classification as a subspecies.[12] On the other, there is the position that genetic variation in the extant human population is large enough to justify its division into several subspecies[citation needed]. Linneaeus (1758) proposed division into five subspecies, H. sapiens europaeus alongside H. s. afer, H. s. americanus and H. s. asiaticus for Europeans, Africans, Americans and Asians. This convention remained commonly observed until the mid-20th century, sometimes with variations or additions such as H. s. tasmanianus for Australians.[13] The conventional division of extant human populations into taxonomic subspecies was gradually abandoned beginning in the 1970s.[14] Similarly, there are proposals to classify Neanderthals[15] and Homo rhodesiensis as subspecies of H. sapiens, although it remains more common to treat these last two as separate species within the genus Homo rather than as subspecies within H. sapiens.[16]
The following names mimick binomial nomenclature, mostly consisting of Homo followed by a Latin adjective characterizing human nature. Most of them were coined since the mid 20th century in imitation of Homo sapiens in order to make some philosophical point (either serious or ironic), but some go back to the 18th to 19th century, as in Homo aestheticus vs. Homo oeconomicus; Homo loquens is a serious suggestion by Herder, taking the human species as defined by the use of language;[17]Homo creator is medieval, coined by Nicolaus Cusanus in reference to man as imago Dei.
Name
Translation
Notes
Homo absconditus
"man the inscrutable"
Soloveitchik 1965 Lonely Man of Faith
Homo absurdus
“absurd man”
Giovanni Patriarca Homo Economicus, Absurdus, or Viator? 2014
Homo adaptabilis
“adaptable man”
Giovanni Patriarca Homo Economicus, Absurdus, or Viator? 2014
Homo adorans
"worshipping man"
Man as a worshipping agent, a servant of God or gods.[18]
Homo aestheticus
"aesthetic man"
in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the main antagonist of Homo oeconomicus in the internal conflict tormenting the philosopher. Homo aestheticus is "man the aristocrat" in feelings and emotions.[19]
Man as in possession of an animus sive mens (a soul or mind), Heidegger (1975).[19]
Homo apathetikos
“apathetic man”
Used by Abraham Joshua Heschel in his book The Prophets to refer to the Stoic notion of the ideal human being, one who has attained apatheia.
Homo avarus
"man the greedy"
used for Man "activated by greed" by Barnett (1977).[21]
Homo combinans
"combining man"
man as the only species that performs the unbounded combinatorial operations that underlie syntax and possibly other cognitive capacities; Cedric Boeckx 2009.[22]
Homo communicans
"communicating man"
Homo contaminatus
"contaminated man"
suggested by Romeo (1979) alongside Homo inquinatus ("polluted man") "to designate contemporary Man polluted by his own technological advances".[23]
a man or the mankind as a whole if they undergo any regressive development (devolution); Andrej Poleev 2013[25]
Homo demens
"mad man"
man as the only being with irrational delusions. Edgar Morin 1973 [The Lost Paradigm: Human Nature]
Homo deus
"human god"
Man as god, endowed with supernatural abilities such as eternal life as outlined in Yuval Noah Harari's 2015 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Homo dictyous
"network man"
Humankind as having a brain evolved for social connections
used as a term for mankind considered as human in the cultural sense, as opposed to homo biologicus, man considered as a biological species (and thus synonymous with Homo sapiens); the distinction was made in these terms by John N. Deely (1973).[29]
The human is a questioning / inquiring being, a being who not only asks questions but capable of questioning/questing without there being an object referent for the inquiry itself and capable of ever-asking. Abraham Joshua Heschel discussed this idea in his 1965 book Who is Man? but John Bruin coined the term in his 2001 book Homo Interrogans: Questioning and the Intentional Structure of Cognition
Homo ignorans
"ignorant man"
antonym to sciens (Bazán 1972, Romeo 1979:64)
Homo interreticulatus
"buried-within-the-rectangle man"
used by philosopher David Bentley Hart to describe humanity lost within the screens of computers and other devices [31]
Homo investigans
"investigating man"
human curiosity and capability to learn by deduction, Werner Luck 1976[citation needed]
Homo juridicus
"juridical man"
Homo juridicus identifies normative primacy of law, Alain Supiot, 2007.[32]
"the man who participates with others in rituals that recognize and enact meaning"
Philosopher James K. A. Smith uses this terms to describe a basic way in which humans dwell together with habitual practices that both embody and reorient us toward shared higher goods.[33]
Homo logicus
"the man who wants to understand"
Homo logicus are driven by an irresistible desire to understand how things work. By contrast, Homo sapiens have a strong desire for success. Alan Cooper 1999
"Novelty-loving man" and "Novelty-fearing man", respectively
coined by characters in the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson to describe two distinct types of human being: one which seeks out and embraces new ideas and situations (neophilus), and another which clings to habit and fears the new (neophobus).
Homo otiosus
“slacker man”
The 11th Edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica defines man as “a seeker after the greatest degree of comfort for the least necessary expenditure of energy”. In The Restless Compendium Michael Greaney credits Sociologist Robert Stebbins with coining the term “homo otiosus” to refer to the privileged economic class of “persons of leisure”, asserting that a distinctiveness of humans is that they (unlike other animals and machines) are capable of intentional laziness.[36]
A comment on human foreign relations and the increasing ability of man to wage war by anatomist W. M. Cobb in the Journal of the National Medical Association in 1969 and 1975.[39][40]
Homo sciens
"knowing man"
used by Siger of Brabant, noted as a precedent of Homo sapiens by Bazán (1972) (Romeo 1979:128)
Homo sentimentalis
"sentimental man"
man born to a civilization of sentiment, who has raised feelings to a category of value; the human ability to empathize, but also to idealize emotions and make them servants of ideas. Milan Kundera in Immortality (1990), Eugene Halton in Bereft of Reason: On the Decline of Social Thought and Prospects for Its Renewal (1995).
Homo socius
"social man"
man as a social being. Inherent to humans as long as they have not lived entirely in isolation. Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966).
a sarcastic and critical reference to an average conformist person in the USSR and other countries of the Eastern Bloc. The term was popularized by Soviet writer and sociologist Aleksandr Zinovyev, who wrote the book titled Homo Sovieticus.
The emergence of symbolic culture. 2011 [Editors Christopher S. Henshilwood & Francesco d'Errico, Homo Symbolicus: The dawn of language, imagination and spirituality[41]] and [42]
Homo sympathetikos
“sympathetic man”
The term used by Abraham Joshua Heschel in his book The Prophets to refer to the prophetic ideal for humans: sympathetic feeling or sharing in the concerns of others, the highest expression of which is sharing in God's concern / feeling / pathos.
Coined and defined by Bertram Henry Shadduck in his 1924 tract Jocko-Homo Heavenbound the phrase gained prominence via the release DEVO’s 1977 song Jocko Homo.
In fiction, specifically science fiction and fantasy, occasionally names for the human species are introduced reflecting the fictional situation of humans existing alongside other, non-human civilizations. In science fiction, Earthling (also "Terran", "Earther", and "Gaian") is frequently used, as it were naming humanity by its planet of origin. Incidentally, this situation parallels the naming motive of ancient terms for humanity, including "human" (homo, humanus) itself, derived from a word for "earth" to contrast humans as earth-bound with celestial beings (i.e. deities) in mythology.
Carl Linnaeus, also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as Carolus Linnæus and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as Carolus a Linné.
Linnaean taxonomy can mean either of two related concepts:
The particular form of biological classification (taxonomy) set up by Carl Linnaeus, as set forth in his Systema Naturae (1735) and subsequent works. In the taxonomy of Linnaeus there are three kingdoms, divided into classes, and they, in turn, into lower ranks in a hierarchical order.
A term for rank-based classification of organisms, in general. That is, taxonomy in the traditional sense of the word: rank-based scientific classification. This term is especially used as opposed to cladistic systematics, which groups organisms into clades. It is attributed to Linnaeus, although he neither invented the concept of ranked classification nor gave it its present form. In fact, it does not have an exact present form, as "Linnaean taxonomy" as such does not really exist: it is a collective (abstracting) term for what actually are several separate fields, which use similar approaches.
In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature, also called binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin grammatical forms, although they can be based on words from other languages. Such a name is called a binomial name, a binomen, binominal name, or a scientific name; more informally it is also historically called a Latin name. In the ICZN, the system is also called binominal nomenclature, "binomi'N'al" with an "N" before the "al", which is not a typographic error, meaning "two-name naming system".
Early modern human (EMH), or anatomically modern human (AMH), are terms used to distinguish Homo sapiens that are anatomically consistent with the range of phenotypes seen in contemporary humans, from extinct archaic human species. This distinction is useful especially for times and regions where anatomically modern and archaic humans co-existed, for example, in Paleolithic Europe. Among the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens are those found at the Omo-Kibish I archaeological site in south-western Ethiopia, dating to about 233,000 to 196,000 years ago, the Florisbad site in South Africa, dating to about 259,000 years ago, and the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco, dated about 315,000 years ago.
Apes are a clade of Old World simians native to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, which together with its sister group Cercopithecidae form the catarrhine clade, cladistically making them monkeys. Apes do not have tails due to a mutation of the TBXT gene. In traditional and non-scientific use, the term ape can include tailless primates taxonomically considered Cercopithecidae, and is thus not equivalent to the scientific taxon Hominoidea. There are two extant branches of the superfamily Hominoidea: the gibbons, or lesser apes; and the hominids, or great apes.
The suffix -onym is a bound morpheme, that is attached to the end of a root word, thus forming a new compound word that designates a particular class of names. In linguistic terminology, compound words that are formed with suffix -onym are most commonly used as designations for various onomastic classes. Most onomastic terms that are formed with suffix -onym are classical compounds, whose word roots are taken from classical languages.
Herto Man refers to human remains discovered in 1997 from the Upper Herto member of the Bouri Formation in the Afar Triangle, Ethiopia. The remains have been dated as between 154,000 and 160,000 years old. The discovery of Herto Man was especially significant at the time, falling within a long gap in the fossil record between 300 and 100 thousand years ago and representing the oldest dated H. sapiens remains then described.
Homo is a monotypic genus that emerged from the genus Australopithecus and encompasses the extant species Homo sapiens and several extinct species classified as either ancestral to or closely related to modern humans, including Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. The oldest member of the genus is Homo habilis, with records of just over 2 million years ago. Homo, together with the genus Paranthropus, is probably sister to Australopithecus africanus, which itself had split from the lineage of Pan, the chimpanzees.
Paleoanthropology or paleo-anthropology is a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization, through the reconstruction of evolutionary kinship lines within the family Hominidae, working from biological evidence and cultural evidence.
Self-reflection is the ability to witness and evaluate our own cognitive, emotional, and behavioural processes. In psychology, other terms used for this self-observation include 'reflective awareness', and 'reflective consciousness', which originate from the work of William James.
Systema Naturae is one of the major works of the Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) and introduced the Linnaean taxonomy. Although the system, now known as binomial nomenclature, was partially developed by the Bauhin brothers, Gaspard and Johann, Linnaeus was first to use it consistently throughout his book. The first edition was published in 1735. The full title of the 10th edition (1758), which was the most important one, was Systema naturæ per regna tria naturæ, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis or translated: "System of nature through the three kingdoms of nature, according to classes, orders, genera and species, with characters, differences, synonyms, places".
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.
Blombos Cave is an archaeological site located in Blombos Private Nature Reserve, about 300 km east of Cape Town on the Southern Cape coastline, South Africa. The cave contains Middle Stone Age (MSA) deposits currently dated at between c. 100,000 and 70,000 years Before Present (BP), and a Late Stone Age sequence dated at between 2000 and 300 years BP. The cave site was first excavated in 1991 and field work has been conducted there on a regular basis since 1997, and is ongoing.
A number of varieties of Homo are grouped into the broad category of archaic humans in the period that precedes and is contemporary to the emergence of the earliest early modern humans around 300 ka. Among the earliest remains of H. sapiens are those from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, Florisbad in South Africa (259 ka), and Omo-Kibish I in southern Ethiopia. The term typically includes H. antecessor, H. bodoensis, Denisovans (H. denisova), H. heidelbergensis (600–200 ka), Neanderthals, and H. rhodesiensis (300–125 ka).
The term man and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole.
Homo sapiens is the taxonomic binomial species name for modern humans.
Anthropomorpha is a defunct taxon, replaced by Primates.
Homo erectus is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, with its earliest occurrence about 2 million years ago. Its specimens are among the first recognizable members of the genus Homo.
The Hominidae, whose members are known as the great apes or hominids, are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: Pongo ; Gorilla ; Pan ; and Homo, of which only modern humans remain.
The Petralona Cave also Cave of the Red Stones, a karst formation, is located at 300 m (984 ft) above sea-level on the western foot of Mount Katsika, about 1 km (0.62 mi) east of the village of Petralona, about 35 km (22 mi) south-east of Thessaloniki city on the Chalkidiki peninsula, Greece. The site came to public attention when in 1960 a fossilized archaic human skull was found. The cave had been discovered accidentally only a year earlier (1959) after erosion had left clefts in the rock. "Bejeweled" with impressive stalactite and stalagmite formations and holding an abundance of fossils, the cave soon attracted geologists and paleontologists. After decades of excavations the cave is open to the public and scientific work is documented and presented in an adjacent archaeological museum.
↑ Starostin, Sergei; Dybo, Anna; Mudrak, Oleg (2003), *k`i̯uĺe in: Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages (Handbuch der Orientalistik; VIII.8), Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill (starling.rinet.ru).
↑ Romain Garnier proposed another etymology in his 2007 article «Nouvelles réflexions étymologiques autour du grec ἄνθρωπος», deriving it from Proto-Indo-European *n̥dʰreh₃kʷó- ("that which is below"), hence "earthly, human".
↑ its first element čelo- may be cognate with Sanskrit kula- "family, sept; herd"; the second element -věkъ may be cognate with Latvian vaiks, Lithuanian vaĩkas "boy, child". Max Vasmer, Russisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1950–58).
↑ Baxter-Sagart reconstruction of Old Chinese (Version 1.1, 20 September 2014)
↑ Plato (1975) [1925]. "The Statesman". Plato in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation. Vol.VIII (The Statesman, Philebus, Ion). Translated by Harold N[orth] Fowler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann. pp.40–41. ISBN978-0-674-99182-8. λέγω δὴ δεῖν τότε εὐθὺς τὸ πεζὸν τῷ δίποδι πρὸς τὸ τετράπουν γένος διανεῖμαι, κατιδόντα δὲ τἀνθρώπινον ἔτι μόνῳ τῷ πτηνῷ συνειληχὸς τὴν δίποδα ἀγέλην πάλιν τῷ ψιλῷ καὶ τῷ πτεροφυεῖ τέμνειν, [...][I say, then, that we ought at that time to have divided walking animals immediately into biped and quadruped, then seeing that the human race falls into the same division with the feathered creatures and no others, we must again divide the biped class into featherless and feathered, [...]]
↑ Plato defined a human as a featherless, biped animal and was applauded. Diogenes of Sinope plucked a chicken and brought it into the lecture hall, saying: "Here is Plato's human!", Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Philosophers 6.40
1 2 Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958
↑ Linné, Carl von (1758). Systema naturæ. Regnum animale (10ed.). pp.18, 20. Retrieved 19 November 2012.. Note: In 1959, Linnaeus was designated as the lectotype for Homo sapiens (Stearn, W. T. 1959. "The background of Linnaeus's contributions to the nomenclature and methods of systematic biology", Systematic Zoology 8 (1): 4-22, p. 4) which means that following the nomenclatural rules, Homo sapiens was validly defined as the animal species to which Linnaeus belonged.
↑ See e.g. John Wendell Bailey, The Mammals of Virginia (1946), p. 356.; Journal of Mammalogy 26-27 (1945), p. 359.; J. Desmond Clark (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, Cambridge University Press (1982), p. 141 (with references).
↑ e.g. Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, Volume 11, p. 55.
↑ "Homo neanderthalensis King, 1864". Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. 2013. pp.328–331.
↑ Compare alalus "incapable of speech" as the species name given to Java Man fossil, at the time (1895) taken to reflect a pre-human stage of "ape-man" (Pithecanthropus). Herder's Homo loquens was parodied by Henri Bergson (1943) as Homo loquax i.e. Man as chattering or overly talkative.
↑ Alexander Schmemann in 1973, in his book For the Life of the World. This theme is picked up by Dr. James Jordan at the Biblical Horizon Institute, and Dr. Peter Leithart in New Saint Andrews College.
↑ Homo Symbolicus: The dawn of language, imagination and spirituality: Amazon.co.uk: Henshilwood, Christopher S., d'Errico, Francesco: 9789027211897: Books. ASIN9027211892.
Luigi Romeo, Ecce Homo!: A Lexicon of Man, John Benjamins Publishing, 1979.
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