17 August 2012

Refinement: Primate Anatomical Similarity

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.




2 comments:

  1. 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 ;)
    -Johannes

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  2. 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!)

    It is important to keep in mind, though, that I'm not doing a phylogenetic analysis here -- purely phenetic. Still, interesting.

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