I thought obvious that the joke refers to the misconception some people host that 'homo sapiens' is a less evolved species than modern people, something we out-evolved.
In my experience, it's usually people trying to overexplain "homo sapiens sapiens" and "homo sapiens neanderthalensis" because they don't know anything about the topic at hand except those words. Subspecies on the character sheet has always been a technicality issue.