Tattersall I, Schwartz J H
Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, USA.
Anat Rec. 1998 Aug;253(4):113-7. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-0185(199808)253:4<113::AID-AR6>3.0.CO;2-U.
Morphology carries the primary signal of events in the evolutionary history of any group of organisms but has been relatively neglected by paleoanthropologists, those who study the history of the human species. Partly this is the result of historical influences, but it is also due to a rather fundamentalist adherence among paleoanthropologists to the tenets of the Neodarwinian Evolutionary Synthesis. The result has been a general paleoanthropological desire to project the species Homo sapiens back into the past as far and in as linear a manner as possible. However, it is clear that the human fossil record, like that of most other taxa, reveals a consistent pattern of systematic diversity--a diversity totally unreflected in the conventional minimalist interpretation of that record. Thus, the Neanderthals, both morphologically and behaviorally as distinctive a group of hominids as ever existed, are conventionally classified simply as a subspecies of our own species Homo sapiens--a classification that robs these extinct relatives of their evolutionary individuality. Only when we recognize the Neanderthals as a historically distinctive evolutionary entity, demanding understanding in its own terms, will we be able to do them proper justice. And we will only be able to do this by restoring morphology to its proper place of primacy in human evolutionary studies.
形态学承载着任何生物群体进化历史中事件的主要信号，但却一直相对被古人类学家忽视，古人类学家是研究人类物种历史的人。部分原因是历史影响的结果，但这也归因于古人类学家对新达尔文进化综合论原则的一种原教旨主义坚持。结果是古人类学普遍希望尽可能久远且以线性方式将智人物种投射到过去。然而，很明显，人类化石记录与大多数其他分类群的记录一样，揭示了一种系统多样性的一致模式——这种多样性在对该记录的传统极简主义解释中完全没有体现。因此，尼安德特人，无论在形态上还是行为上都是有史以来最独特的一群原始人，传统上仅被归类为我们自己物种智人的一个亚种——这种分类剥夺了这些已灭绝亲属的进化独特性。只有当我们将尼安德特人视为一个具有历史独特性的进化实体，需要根据其自身情况来理解时，我们才能给予他们应有的公正。而我们只有通过将形态学恢复到其在人类进化研究中应有的首要地位才能做到这一点。
