>The reason for this likely elevated status is because we can now say that anamensis and afarensis actually overlapped in time.<p>This seems to be the rule, rather than the other exception, at least in human evolution. Erectus overlapped with more modern archaics, for example. Habilis overlapped with afarensis.<p>A lot of these are more about the semantics than the substance. Words like "species" get tricky, when you're dealing with chronspecies, introgression and such.<p>In any case, our evolution since speciating from chimps is extremely bushy. There are lots of species, and several families. The process involved lots of innovation/speciation and extinctions. Ie, The australopithecine family that this species may have founded produced many species, including at least two that formed their own families with multiple species of their own (paranthropous & homo).<p>I think this is characteristic of fast evolutionary processes.