Middle Pleistocene Hominin Systematics: The “Chibanian Puzzle”

The primary goal of the workshop “Meet the Chibanians” held at Novi Sad in 2023—and of the resulting papers—is to establish a broad consensus among the researchers on exactly how to describe the place of hominin fossils that cannot be easily assigned to Homo erectus, H. neanderthalensis, or H. sapiens from the late Middle and early Late Pleistocene across the Old World. A great deal of this discussion revolves around exactly how many hominin taxa were present during this period (Middle-Late Pleistocene) and how they were related to each other. We introduce the papers in this Special Issue of PaleoAnthropology and how they relate to the current state of research.