Right back at you with the citation needed. Humanoid is not a taxonomic term anymore. All Homo are humans. Never said modern, which it obviously isn't.
> Although some scientists equate the term "humans" with all members of the genus Homo, in common usage it generally refers to Homo sapiens, the only extant member.
There's no citation for that claim and it would be unlikely for there to be one.
It's just some dude's personal impression about a subjective matter (a word in transition), and carries no more weight than any other comment being made here.
A more meaningful source would be a usage guide like Garner's Modern English.
Actually, it is cited. The fragment you quoted is from the lede, which is supposed to summarize the rest of the material. So if you read on to the section "Etymology and definition", you find that the same claim is cited to Merriam Webster.
As it happens, this citation is useless, because it doesn't support the claim. Basically, I think it's fraudulent to cite that claim to that MW article.
I feel like this is peak HN pedantry, but it seems like there's some controversy amongst anthropologists these days as how to sort of colloquially define human; I've heard some say that any species in the genus homo should qualify.
Perhaps my mind is so open that it's in danger of falling out, but when people say that that's so easy to define and then don't do so, I get really confused. I'm like, have you ever seen a dude who looks like a lady? It's a question that's bedeviled sports for a long time actually - in the 60's the Olympics required "nude parades" to check that competitors were in fact women, but obviously that had some problems. I believe they eventually settled on some sort of hormone ratio as the definition.
In the classical Olympics, as in all Greek athletic competitions, all competitors were required to be nude during the events. You can't compete in clothes.
I mean, who actually cares about things like chafing, sunburns, or the awkward stares of spectators? Let's all just embrace our inner Greek and strip down for the 100-meter dash.
HN really isn't the place for this conversation, but if we ever found a human whose biological sex was ambiguous using a simple checklist with maybe three tests in it, that would be a first. Woman and man are complex, female and male are not. Yes, this includes all known intersex conditions. No, there's no significant disagreement about those criteria.
Funny, I think HN is the ideal place for this conversation, though it's a bit weird to get there on this thread. But it's a subject of fascination for me personally, and it's a shame that it's taken on weird political dimensions.
I was under the impression that Caster Semenya tends to confound simple categorization like you suggest.
> Sex assignment is the discernment of an infant's sex, usually at birth.
The question is not whether you can briefly look between someone's legs and determine their sex. We know (per the article) that this can fail as much as 0.05% of the time.
The question was what is Caster Semenya's biological sex: the answer is male. This is, in fact, clear.
"Humanoid" refers to anything with a human body morphology (i.e., bipedal, two legs, two arms, head). That can be actual humans, human-looking robots, bipedal aliens with bilateral symmetry, or even Barbie dolls I suppose.
