The Origins of Man

Brian Switek at Laelaps has written an absolutely fantastic post on the history of scientific and philosophical theories on the origin of humans. If you haven't seen it yet, you go, read now! I found Alfred Romer's quoted comment on the diversity of named hominin 'genera' very informative, correlating as it did with my suspicions that the names were used almost as a shorhand to refer to individual specimens rather than representing actual biological taxa.