1

My friend keeps saying that there was a first Homo sapiens. Meaning, there was a very first human being that was ever born.

I can't really understand what she means to say from a selection/gene mutation perspective. I can't understand how there would be anything that could be considered the very first human being.

Was there ever a very first, singular human being that could be discerned as such?

tyersome
  • 5,598
  • 7
  • 25
  • 40
Nathaniel
  • 13
  • 3
  • Perhaps she is referring to mitochondrial eve or a "common-ancestor of all people alive today" which is popular with journalists, although it's thought that the human population has never had less than a few thousand common ancestors. – bandybabboon Dec 26 '19 at 20:47
  • She means to say the quite literally "someone had to have given birth the the first human baby," just as a logical deduction. There are humans, therefore the must have been a first human baby. So, something gave birth to the very first homo sapien. – Nathaniel Dec 26 '19 at 20:51
  • perhaps ask her who made the first car? what was the first pet dog that wasn't a wolf? – bandybabboon Dec 26 '19 at 21:42
  • Is there some reason you uncorrected the spelling and capitalization of Homo sapiens to "Homo Sapien"? If you insist that is correct please provide a reliable reference that supports that usage. Thanks! – tyersome Dec 26 '19 at 22:07
  • I didn't realize it was corrected since no one posted an edit comment. Since I have other misspellings (doing this from my phone), I assumed I had accidentally left it in the lowercase. I didn't realize that the term is lowercase – Nathaniel Dec 26 '19 at 22:14
  • Yes, for binomial names the genus is always capitalized and the species (and subspecies) are not. ——— On a phone you should still be able to see that a post has been edited and the word "edited" will be a link that takes you to a page that shows you the edit history. ——— You might find it helpful to take the the [tour] and then go through the help pages starting with [Ask] questions effectively on this site to become more familiar with how the site works. – tyersome Dec 27 '19 at 00:37

1 Answers1

4

No. It is important to distinguish "species" as a human system of classification, and "speciation" as a biological process. Except in cases like chromosomal speciation (changes in ploidy), speciation takes a long time. Probably thousands of years between some initial restriction of gene-flow, and fixation of a specific identifiable trait, present in all individuals of a species, and not present in any others. As a human system of classification, the taxonomists who define species would all understand that speciation is a process that occurs over time, although they may make some arbitrary distinction for convenience. For example, a node on a cladogram symbolizes an instantaneous process of species bifurcation, but this is understood to be an unrealistic simplification.

Karl Kjer
  • 7,665
  • 1
  • 18
  • 26