[Taxacom] Richmond and Jungers on Orrorin?

[Barry Roth]

Only that "anomalies" should pique our interest ...

--- On Tue, 5/19/09, John Grehan <jgrehan at sciencebuff.org> wrote:


The paper by Richmond and Jungers seemed to mix up evidence of
bipedalism with evidence of relationship within bipedalism. In their
multivariate cluster analysis (Fig. 1B) they group Orrorin with
Australopiths rather than Homo, and refer to this arrangement as
summarize "affinities". If they are implyin that the mulivariate
simialrity is evidence of phylogenetic relationship then they have the
anomaly of grouping the great apes with each other as a monophyletic
group, with African apes being more closely related to orangutans than
humans. Any comment?

John