Hominin Vs. Hominid: What’s The Difference?

We humans like to think of ourselves as the most advanced and sophisticated creatures ever to walk the Earth, but the truth is that we’re remarkably similar to apes. And as genetic discoveries continue to shorten the evolutionary distance between us and our simian relatives, the terms that we use to differentiate ourselves have had to shift.

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Plan Of The Apes

Before we understood that we’re actually just apes in fancy clothes, we used to think that humans occupied their own highly refined branch on the tree of life. We therefore assigned ourselves to the family Hominidae, while other primates like chimps, gorillas, and orangutans were placed in the Pongidae family.

Based on this understanding, the term hominid referred to modern humans as well as all the extinct members of the Homo lineage – such as Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo erectus, to name a few. It also encompassed several older genera, including Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Ardipithecus.

Essentially, all human ancestors that existed after our evolutionary split from chimpanzees – which occurred around 7 million years ago – were classed as hominids. However, once we discovered how closely related we are to the great apes, we were forced to admit that we actually belong to the same family as chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, and had to take ourselves down a notch by inventing a new term for ourselves.

Enter The Hominin

Nowadays, the Hominidae family includes humans and all of the great apes, reflecting the fact that we are, in fact, kin. As such, the term hominid is no longer reserved for our own kind, but is also bestowed upon our jungle-dwelling relatives. 

It’s only once you get down to the lower rungs of the taxonomical ladder, therefore, that you can actually separate us from the great apes. The first of these to go is the orangutan, which is siphoned off into the subfamily Ponginae, while humans, gorillas, and chimps all fall into the subfamily Homininae.

When we narrow this down further, we lose the gorillas, who are assigned to the Gorillini tribe, while chimpanzees and humans make up the Hominini tribe. Eventually, we get all the way down to the subtribe level, where we finally distance ourselves from ape-kind as we alone populate the Hominina subtribe. Chimps, meanwhile, belong to the subtribe Panina.

Under this new and more accurate classification, the term hominid has been expanded to include all of the great apes and their extinct ancestors, while the word hominin now refers to a single subtribe that encompasses the human lineage since our split from chimpanzees.