If you want to split hairs, Joy, we, along with our Homo associates and forebears are hominins, which you probably know. So my reference was to stop at hominid. Don't progress to hominin. Most readers might not get it.

But please now, I was being fanciful, not scientific. You don't really think you need to inform a biologist that evolution is ongoing, do you?

More to the point, my biological opinion I withheld from this thread: it's simply that our line, which we narcissistically labeled "sapiens" may have come through as the surviving hominin because we were better at interpersonal violence and killed off neandertalis, which given its brain size and what we can deduce of its sociology might have been a better fit with the rest of the biosphere. But then, we also know of sapiens clans who did indeed live in that particular mode of harmoniousness. So the reality is of course complex and mostly speculative. The minor genetic differences between sapiens, neandertalis, floresiensis, Denisovans, would not nearly provide the differentiation necessary to adjudicate. So again, my feelings about sapiens the murdering hominin are clearly back-projection of my revulsion about our murderous selves back through evolutionary time. Not very scientific, I grant you,

Mea culpa. I'm disgusted with my species!