[Taxacom] Richmond and Jungers on Orrorin?

[John Grehan]

Tricky...but on page 1663, left column five lines from the bottoms they
say in reference to Fig. 1B that "modern humans and fossil Homo form a
group that is linked to a cluster of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and
O. tugenensis, and these two groups are joined by a more distant cluster
of extant apes". Since they also characterize the clusters in 1B as
"affinities" would I be correct to say that their data an clustering
methods grouped Orrorin with Australopiths and that they interpreted
this clustering as affinities by which Orrorin was linked with Homo and
australopiths, and that African apes were linked with orangutans?

John Grehan 



> -----Original Message-----
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-
> bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Jensen
> Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 9:00 AM
> To: Barry Roth
> Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Richmond and Jungers on Orrorin?
> 
> And, that Richmond and Jungers didn't "group Orrorin with
> Australopiths". Their data, and their chosen method of analysis, did
> that. One might question the way they scored their OTUs, recorded and,
> perhaps, transformed, their data, and the methods chosen for their
> cluster analysis.
> 
> Dick J
> 
> Richard Jensen, Professor
> Department of Biology
> Saint Mary's College
> Notre Dame, IN 46556
> Tel: 574-284-4674
> 
> 
> 
> Barry Roth wrote:
> > 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
> >
> >
> >
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