Shortly after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” (Darwin, 1859), King (1864) attributed the fossil remains from the Klein Feldhofer Grotte in the Neander Valley, Germany to a new species of extinct human ancestor, Homo neanderthalensis. King's assertion came amidst a heated debate about the taxonomic status of these remains (Huxley, 1863). Thirty years later, Dubois (1892, 1894) expanded human prehistory to Asia with the discovery of Homo erectus remains in Java. Some 30 years after that, Dart (1925) brought attention to the African continent with the discovery of the Taung skull. Dart's work ushered in a phase of rapid growth in paleoanthropology, with new fossil discoveries from diverse sites accompanied by the introduction of many new taxonomic names. By the middle of the 20th century, there were over 100 named genera, species, and subspecies in the human fossil record and many researchers recognized that the nomenclature of paleoanthropology was in ‘chaos’ (Mayr, 1950; Simpson, 1963; Campbell, 1965), prompting a taxonomic revision and initial efforts to catalog the names and fossils that make up the material evidence of human evolution (Campbell, 1965, 1971, 1975). These efforts signaled the beginning of paleoanthropology's next challenge, to organize, manage, and synthesize the diverse and complex information being collected in the field and laboratory, including its nomenclature and systematics.

Within systematics, taxonomy focuses on delimiting organisms into biologically distinct groupings (taxa) and arranging them in classifications (Simpson, 1963). The rules of nomenclature govern what names are properly applied to taxa and which fossils bear the name as type specimens. This paper presents an online resource for the paleoanthropological community to track hominin nomenclature. It is an example of the application of findable, accessible, interoperable and reproducible (FAIR) principles that provides open access to common data (Wilkinson et al., 2016; Stall et al., 2019; Mulligan et al., 2022). The nomenclature resource is part of a larger effort to document the hominin fossil record, called Origins, which, in turn is, built on Paleo Core (https://paleocore.org/origins), a free, open-source platform for integrating data in paleoanthropology (Reed et al., 2015, 2018, 2021).

The website documents the metadata terms used to share information about nomenclature, and it provides a comprehensive, searchable list of nomina relevant to the fossil history of human evolution. This information is also provided in the Supplementary Online Material (SOM) Tables S1 and S2. These online and print listings of hominin nomina can assist researchers managing nomenclature; it also serves as a bibliographic archive on the history of paleoanthropology that can help students reading older publications that invoke defunct names.

In the process of compiling nomina, it became clear that many of the issues raised in the 1950s and 1960s continue to pose challenges in paleoanthropology: (1) the lack of stable, globally unique, primary identifiers for fossil specimens (i.e. enhanced catalog numbers), (2) the ongoing (and shifting) use of species names to designate informal groups, (3) a lack of transparency regarding the hypodigms of named taxa, and (4) uncertainty regarding the availability and validity of existing names that are called back into service as new fossils are discovered or new theories are developed about the pattern of human evolution. In our view, information systems are a key asset for addressing these challenges. Open and FAIR information systems also form the foundation for expanding access to scientific resources that allow broader participation in scientific advancement and help address the colonial and racist history of paleoanthropology (Blakey, 1999, 2021; Wolpoff and Caspari, 2013; Fuentes, 2020).