John Noble Wilford in The New York Times has a piece titled The Human Family Tree Has Become a Bush With Many Branches, which reflects the current consensus thinking that the hominid lineage was until recently relatively diversified, with a host of species extant contemporaneously (the other view is that many of the "species" we conjecture are just the extant morphological variation of one species across varied local ecological conditions). To be honest the piece seemed to just be throwing a lot of genus and species names at you all the while stirring up the tempest in the tea pot between paleoanthropologists and biologists. Consider:
Now paleoanthropologists say they accept the biologists as allies triangulating the search for human origins from different angles. As much as anything, a rapid succession of fossil discoveries since the early 1990s has restored the confidence of paleoanthropologists in the relevance of their approach to ...
