Sixty years ago, Sherwood Washburn

1. Edited an influential volumeentitled Classification and Human Evolution, which were the proceed – ings from the 1962 Wenner‐Gren Symposium that was held in BurgWartenstein (hereafter “BW’62”) in Austria that focused on homininsystematics. One of the primary results from the BW’62 meeting wasthat the biological species concept (hereafter “BSC”) became firmlyentrenched in paleoanthropology as the structural framework forunderstanding hominin variation. The symposium results contributed toward the reduction in species names in human evolution, a trend that started in the late 1940s and became more prominent after 1950.

2. The effect of this paradigm shift resulted in an untenable assumption that a paleontologically defined hominin taxon represents a biological species (as defined by the BSC)—a problem that, to some extent, still exists in the field today. Unfortunately, this foundation has made it difficult to discuss the growing complexity in light of various evolutionary processes, particularly given how much the hominin fossil record has grown over the past 60 years. Read the full article.