Earlier, I posted a chart showing how similar humans are to other primates (and other euarchontoglires), as measured from Diogo & Wood's (2011) soft-tissue character matrix. A problem with the earlier version was that it doesn't reflect uncertainty in that matrix. (It also wouldn't show polymorphisms, although that matrix doesn't have any, anyway.) I've created a new version that shows the maximum and minimum possible distance, given the uncertainties in the matrix.
Interesting. I'm especially intrigued by how different orangutans are from humans in this soft tissue analysis - considering how worked up Schwartz and Grehan are about our hard tissue similarities ;)
ReplyDelete-Johannes
Indeed -- I've also run Strait & Grine's (2004) analysis of craniodental characters -- again, Pan and Gorilla are closer to humans than Pongo is. (Although that one yields some other strange results, like gibbons[!] and guerezas[!!] being between gorillas and chimps in terms of proximity to humans!)
ReplyDeleteIt is important to keep in mind, though, that I'm not doing a phylogenetic analysis here -- purely phenetic. Still, interesting.