In the last few decades, biological anthropologists came to realize that thinking taxonomically about human variation obscured, rather than clarified, the evolutionary patterns that actually exist in our species. Approaching hominin ancestry taxonomically can be especially vexing, for the simple anthropological reason that dead ancestors are universally special in human societies, even in those societies that are composed of scientists. Although paleoanthropology seems to have been riddled with perpetually corrupted biological taxonomy, perhaps the problem is not incompetent biology, but a misapplication of eighteenth-century biological principles. Here, I discuss how the species in paleoanthropology transcends biology, and I suggest the possible merit in trying to make sense of recent human ancestry anthropologically and non-taxonomically.