Hominini

The Hominini (hominins) form a taxonomic tribe of the subfamily Homininae (hominines). They comprise two extant genera: Homo (humans) and Pan (chimpanzees and bonobos), and in standard usage exclude the genus Gorilla (gorillas), which is grouped separately within the subfamily Homininae.

The term Hominini was originally introduced by Camille Arambourg (1948), who combined the categories of Hominina and Simiina pursuant to Gray's classifications (1825).

Traditionally, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans were grouped together, excluding humans, as pongids. Since Gray's classifications, evidence accumulating from genetic phylogeny confirmed that humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas are more closely related to each other than to the orangutan. The orangutans were reassigned to the family Hominidae (great apes), which already included humans; and the gorillas were grouped as a separate tribe (Gorillini) of the subfamily Homininae. Still, details of this reassignment remain contested, and of publishing since (on tribe Hominini), not every source excludes gorillas and not every source includes chimpanzees.

Humans are the only extant species in the Australopithecine branch (subtribe), which also contains many extinct close relatives of humans.

Concerning membership, when Hominini is taken to exclude Pan, Panini ("panins") may refer to the tribe containing Pan as its only genus. Or perhaps place Pan with other dryopithecine genera, making the whole tribe or subtribe of Panini or Panina together. Minority dissenting nomenclatures include Gorilla in Hominini and Pan in Homo (Goodman et al. 1998), or both Pan and Gorilla in Homo (Watson et al. 2001).

By convention, the adjectival term "hominin" (or nominalized "hominins") refers to the tribe Hominini, whereas the members of the subtribe Hominina (and thus all archaic human species) are referred to as "homininan" ("homininans"). This follows the proposal by Mann and Weiss (1996), which presents tribe Hominini as including both Pan and Homo, placed in separate subtribes. The genus Pan is referred to subtribe Panina, and genus Homo is included in the subtribe Hominina (see below).

The alternative convention uses "hominin" to exclude members of Panina: for Homo; or for human and australopithecine species. This alternative convention is referenced in e.g. Coyne (2009) and in Dunbar (2014). Potts (2010) in addition uses the name Hominini in a different sense, as excluding Pan, and uses "hominins" for this, while a separate tribe (rather than subtribe) for chimpanzees is introduced, under the name Panini. In this recent convention, contra Arambourg, the term "hominin" is applied to Homo, Australopithecus, Ardipithecus, and others that arose after the split from the line that led to chimpanzees (see cladogram below); that is, they distinguish fossil members on the human side of the split, as "hominins", from those on the chimpanzee side, as "not hominins" (or "non-hominin hominids").

This cladogram shows the clade of superfamily Hominoidea and its descendant clades, focused on the division of Hominini (omitting detail on clades not ancestral to Hominini). The family Hominidae ("hominids") comprises the tribes Ponginae (including orangutans), Gorillini (including gorillas) and Hominini, the latter two forming the subfamily of Homininae. Hominini is divided into Panina (chimpanzees) and Australopithecina (australopithecines). The Hominina (humans) are usually held to have emerged within the Australopithecina (which would roughly correspond to the alternative definition of Hominini according to the alternative definition which excludes Pan).