28 May 2010

gautengensis in the sediba phylogeny

Here's the phylogeny/taxonomy from the Australopithecus sediba paper overlaid with the taxonomy from the Homo gautengensis paper:



(click to enlarge)

I've highlighted the taxonomic units that Curnoe referred to Homo gautengensis. Note that, by Berger & al.'s phylogeny, Homo gautengensis is polyphyletic. Each of those units represents a single specimen, so this could potentially be explained by individual variation, age differences, sexual dimorphism, etc. Or the new species is overextendedI'm not really qualified to judge.

Note also that Homo is polyphyletic in this phylogeny. One way to fix this is to move sediba into Homo.

3 comments:

  1. Hey, thanks for this.

    I'd been wishing that someone would start to "merge" the various phylogenetic studies that have been done recently around the Au./Homo transition.

    Now if you'd just work in the hobbits cladistics studies, too!
    --Steviepinhead

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  2. Well, I should be making this tool public before too long.

    ReplyDelete