Shoshoni et al on Homo and apes

[john Grehan]

Jason de Koning wrote:

>In addition, there is plenty of morphological data that gives strong support
>to a basal position for Orangutan.  For instance, cladistic analysis of 264
>cranial/post-cranial morphological characters in Shoshani et al., showed
>strong support for (O(G(HC)).  (Mol Phyl Evol 1996, 5:102-154)  This is not
>a molecules versus morphology question.

Well, I went through and counted the morphological synapomorphies listed by
Shoshani et al for Homo et al. I may have missed a couple as there were
some problematic transitional characters I was not sure of in terms of how
they were distributed in 'outgroups', but the vast majority were for a
Homo-African ape clade with a few for Homo-Pan or Homo-Gorilla.

Counting just those proposed for Homo-African apes and Homo-chimp there
were a total of only 30 synapomorphies (of these only 6 supported Homo-Pan).

If these were all to be accepted at face value this is less than the 35
synapomorphies for Homo-Pongo!

Why did this difference not affect Shoshani et al's result - for the
obvious reason that most of the Homo-Pongo characters were not included!

So where does this leave us? Who made that remark about the peanut butter
sandwich?
(I'll have to eat one if I made some awful blunder on this)

John

Dr. John Grehan
Director of Science and Collections
Buffalo Museum of Science
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