Homo Sapiens

Homo sapiens is the only extant human species. The name is Latin for "wise man" and was
introduced in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus (who is himself the lectotype for the species).
Extinct species of the genus Homo include Homo erectus, extant from roughly 1.9 to 0.4 million years
ago, and a number of other species (by some authors considered subspecies of either H.
sapiens or H. erectus). The age of speciation of H. sapiens out of ancestral H. erectus (or an
intermediate species such as Homo antecessor) is estimated to have been roughly 350,000 years
ago.[note 1] Sustained archaic admixture is known to have taken place both in Africa and (following
the recent Out-Of-Africa expansion) in Eurasia, between about 100,000 and 30,000 years ago.[4]
The term anatomically modern humans[5] (AMH) is used to distinguish H. sapiens having
an anatomy consistent with the range of phenotypes seen in contemporary humans from varieties of
extinct archaic humans. This is useful especially for times and regions where anatomically modern
and archaic humans co-existed, for example, in Paleolithic Europe.