How many human species are there, anyway? New discoveries keeping adding more data and more questions to the heap of possibilities.
Scientists have known for a long time there was never a neat line of human evolution from apes to "cavemen" to us. That old chart some of us still remember from in school had a very simplistic view of our ancestors (and also showed them as white guys).
"Scientists have many more pieces of the human-origins puzzle than they once did, but the puzzle is now vastly bigger than it was previously understood to be. Many gaps remain, and some may never close. " - Kate Wong in Scientific American
A good start for the topic is this article on human evolution from the Smithsonian. What's notable about this is that it was published in March of 2021, and it's obsolete.
Just in the last few years:
In 2019, the new species Homo luzonensis was named form the Philippines. It's small with an unusual mix of features including fingers and toes adapted for climbing. The find was published in Nature.
In 2021, we have Homo longi, "Dragon Man," a species from China, at least 146,000 years old. There's a lot of buzz about the size of the skull: it shows a brain the size of a modern humans, and that alone is a stunner to anthropologists. (The formal paper is here.)
And now we have the "Nesher Ramla Homo type" from Israel, some 20,000 years younger. The discoverers don't think it's a new species, but it's unique, with some Neanderthal traits. (Here's the paper in Science.)
Where is all this taking us? To greater knowledge, yet greater mystery. It's a fascinating topic we may have only begun to grasp.
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