Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

News article says humans, but earliest human (homo sapiens) was around 300kya. The actual paper uses the word hominids rather than humans.

The word human is commonly used for both modern humans and members of the entire genus Homo. Hominids is a more general superset that isn't strictly correct here. The term hominin is more appropriate in this context and what they actually use in the abstract.

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".

Is it?

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.

> I have never seen them referred to as human.

I have never seen anything else. But then in French, they are called Neandertal men and Denisova men. So pretty clearly humans.

I think it's typical in non-technical English to use "humans" to refer to homo sapiens only, unless you qualify it, like "archaic/early humans". Without additional context I wouldn't assume somebody talking about humans meant to include e.g. Neanderthals.