What facts exists about us?

Is homo sapiens and homo sapiens sapiens the same? The latter is us as I understands it. But then the below have nothing to do with us, right? Or am I confused ? :p
So how old are WE then? What is fact, or opinion?

www.showmenews.com...
A new analysis of bones unearthed nearly 40 years ago in Ethiopia has pushed the fossil record of modern humans back to nearly 200,000 years ago - perhaps close to the dawn of the species.
Researchers determined that the specimens are around 195,000 years old.

www.eurekalert.org...
These are the oldest well-dated fossils of modern humans (Homo sapiens) currently known anywhere in the world," the scientists say in a summary of the study.
the cultural aspects of humanity in most cases appear much later in the record – only 50,000 years ago – which would mean 150,000 years of Homo sapiens without cultural stuff, such as evidence of eating fish, of harpoons, anything to do with music (flutes and that sort of thing), needles, even tools. This stuff all comes in very late, except for stone knife blades, which appeared between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago, depending on whom you believe."

www.sciencedaily.com...
Early Hominids May Have Behaved More 'Human' Than We Had Thought (August 7, 2003) -- Our earliest ancestors probably behaved in a much more "human" way than most scientists have previously thought, according to a recent study that looked at early hominid fossils

Yes, it IS confusing! Here's the facts as we curretly know them

(Disclaimer: SCIENCE IS NOT A RELIGION. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN UNCHANGEABLE FACT IN SCIENCE. In religion, you have laws and truths that do not change for that religion, no matter what other data comes up. In science, there's no such thing as "we know everything there is about this, so NYAAH!" As we develop new tools and learn more, every bit of knowledge will get tweaked a bit or even changed. This is science in action -- continually discovering, continually exploring, continually evolving)

Okay. Lecture is over.



The hominid timeline is pretty well established, though some surprises (homo florienesis) happen.

We are homo sapiens. Our "parent" species was homo erectus. Our "cousin"species include h. florienesis, h. neanderthalis, h. heidelbergensis and so forth. H. erectus' parent species was Australopithecus Afaraensis.

This chart gives us as h. sapiens sapiens and the Neanderthals as h.sapiens neanderthalis -- but it's a pretty good picture of how our species came to be:
www.wsu.edu:8001...

So why the Homo sapiens sapiens, etc? Because right now there's some debate whether or not modern humans and Neanderthals mated and had offspring that were also able to have children. There's some skeletal material that suggests this happened... but there's not enough of it to be definite about it.

If they couldn't breed, that would put Neanderthals in a different species (H. neanderthalis.) If they COULD breed, Neanderthals would be the same species but a different subspecies: h. sap. neand.



And yes, all those stories pertain to us.

[edit on 20-6-2005 by Byrd]