Most of these groups were probably your ancestors. Some may have contributed more to your genetic makeup than others, this is irrelevant. Choosing to call some human but not others is a poor categorization decision that should be rectified.
No, Humans are specifically and exclusively the species Homo Sapiens. Furthermore, your supposition that "Most of these groups were probably your ancestors" is quite literally what the research described in this article is about, because that is not a known fact, and only one of multiple hypothesis.
The prevailing theory is that your claim here is entirely wrong, and that early humans killed and possibly ate the Neanderthals rather than interbreeding with them.
Step back and think about what you are doing right now. You're commenting about scientific research around an unknown point in anthropological history... making claims that would require you to know that point of history that is not known.
In that taxonomy, Human refers to the species of Homo sapiens. Wikipedia list the classification for it pretty well under the "Scientific classification" header: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
Until very recently, it was presumpted that modern humans (me and you) came exclusively from the Homo Sapiens specie.
> Though I do seem to recall all sorts of hominids being called "early humans" in my elementary and middle school texts
Yes sometimes Human could refer to the genus Homo instead of the species Homo Sapiens. Which is where people will say modern human/early human to disambiguate.
But what is novel is that modern humans might not actually be Homo Sapiens, but hybrids of different species from the genus of Homo, such as Homo Neanderthalensis.
This has been shown in 2010 thorough novel DNA evidence from modern human DNA. And this article just now shows that we found a teeth with hybrid characteristics.
Even more interesting, not every modern human have Homo Neanderthalensis DNA in them.
All of this is new development, and there's still much we don't know.
