In my opinion though, "human" is the better word here for conveying the right mix of informality without implying the specific semantics of "Hominini sans Pan".
This is literally the first time Ive seen the word human applied to other hominids. I see many discussions about neanderthals and denisovians and so on. I have never seen them referred to as human.
Natural history museum, for example, refers to them as early humans: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.htm...
https://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/0813...
This is just one of many examples of definitions being extremely unstandardized in human evolution. You get used to it after awhile.
Does this mean I am only part human?
The Wikipedia article [1] on humans makes the same point. It does acknowledge that some use the term human to refer to all members of the genus homo, but this is not the common usage.
Generally Neanderthals are pointed out as an exception to cross species fertility since... humans have some Neanderthal DNA.
There's no such rule and Neanderthals are not notable as an exception. Fertility is just a very rough proxy for genetic distance, which is correlated to our arbitrary "species" buckets but by no means a real line or hard rule. Many, many reasonably closely related species can interbreed, like jaguars and lions. Most of homo that had the opportunity could probably interbreed.
I respectfully disagree, as started in my earlier post. It would be nice if human language worked like that, but it does not always. A "stone frigate" isn't a boat, an "iron lung" isn't a respiratory organ.
> 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. All other members of the genus Homo, which are now extinct, are known as archaic humans, and the term "modern human" is used to distinguish Homo sapiens from archaic humans.
I think it's a case of the classic issue of trying to make sharp boundaries in a continuum. There just are no fully satisfying answers.
That's fine in general. Many words are like that. But it makes it flawed as a scientific concept.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.htm...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/are-neanderthals-human...
It's really unfortunate that schools tend to simplify the definition of species in this way, because it's just not really not meaningfully true at all. We could "make" it true by actually defining species this way (at least for animals) but it'd radically transform our taxonomies.