INTRODUCTION Initial baraminology studies of hominins identified the human holobaramin as members of the genus Homo together with Au. sediba (Wood 2010). Subsequent studies have reinforced this and recognized the recently discovered Homo naledi as human as well (Wood 2016, 2017). Only Homo floresiensis repeatedly fails to group with members of the human holobaramin (Sinclair and Wood 2021), despite a plausible case for their humanity based on behavioral considerations (Wise 2005). Aside from this anomaly, the repeated confirmation of the human holobaramin using multiple taxon and character samples makes the human holobaramin the most robustly identified holobaramin in all of baraminology. In spite of this string of successes, hominin baraminology has been criticized from the beginning for including taxa in the human kind that critics believe do not belong (e.g., DeWitt 2010; Habermehl 2010; Menton 2010). O’Micks (2016) attempted to show that hominin baraminology did not support including Homo naledi or Au. sediba in the human holobaramin, but his analysis failed to properly account for sample size. His further attempts to perform baraminology on postcranial character matrices (O’Micks 2017a, 2017b) were not holistic, which weakens his conclusions. A more substantive critique came from Reeves (2021a, 2021b), wherein he exposed shortcomings in the methodology used to define the human holobaramin. Wood’s response (2021) showed that the original methods, while questionable on a theoretical level, nevertheless agreed very well with more conventional cluster analysis methods, such as medoid partitioning and fuzzy analysis. Sinclair and Wood (2021) subsequently showed that the expanded set of clustering tools recommended by Reeves (2021b) actually supported including Au. sediba and the genus Homo (except H. floresiensis) in the human holobaramin. That said, all previous hominin baraminology studies by Wood (2010, 2016, 2017; Sinclair and Wood 2021) were based only on craniodental characters. Thus, despite showing a clearly and robustly defined human holobaramin, the research was not truly holistic. One might argue that holism is too poorly defined to be of practical value in baraminology, but on a relative basis, holism has some merit. Considering only teeth or humeri or pelves is certainly less informative than considering an entire skeleton. While skulls are information dense (and for hominins, sometimes the only elements that are available), they give a more limited perspective on the human kind than considering characters from the entire body. This is especially important since creationists have long relied on the form of the entire skeleton to distinguish human from nonhuman (e.g., Hartwig-Scherer 1998; Lubenow 2004). Previously, efforts to study postcranial material were hampered by the limited number of taxa for which postcranial material was known (Wood 2013) and by the availability of material for study. Significant advances in the past two decades have substantially altered this situation. Newly described taxa have been found alongside substantial skeletal material (Berger et al. 2010, 2015), and new discoveries have expanded our understanding of the skeleton of Au. afarensis (Haile-Selassie et al. 2010; Alemseged et al. 2006), Au. africanus (Clarke 2019a), and the Dmanisi hominins (Lordkipanidze et al. 2007). Further, highly detailed 3D scans have made many of these new discoveries publicly available, and other projects such as NESPOS (Groening et al. 2007) have made scans of previously discovered hominin fossils accessible to researchers. With these important new advances, creationists can now evaluate postcranial hominin characteristics more carefully than ever before. To take advantage of these new resources and discoveries, we developed our own postcranial character matrix for hominins, from a combination of previously published character matrices, previously Todd Charles Wood, and PS Brummel, Core Academy of Science, P.O. Box 1076 Dayton, TN 37321 USA, toddcharleswood@ gmail.com, peter_brummel@yahoo.com © Cedarville University International Conference on Creationism. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of Cedarville University. 9th 2023 Wood, T.C., and P.S. Brummel. 2023. Hominin Baraminology Reconsidered with Postcranial Characters. In J.H. Whitmore (editor), Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, pp. 251-266. Cedarville, Ohio: Cedarville University International Conference on Creationism. HOMININ BARAMINOLOGY RECONSIDERED WITH POSTCRANIAL CHARACTERS To date, hominin baraminology has been evaluated almost exclusively by craniodental characters, even though baraminology is ideally “holistic.” Here, we present a new character set of 239 postcranial characters scored for fourteen taxa. The new matrix has 65.7% of its characters scored, which is comparable to existing craniodental character sets. We re-evaluated craniodental characters, postcranial characters, and a combined craniodental+postcranial character set using distance correlation and cluster analysis. Our results reveal that clustering with postcranial characters closely resembles clustering seen with craniodental characters or the combined character set. The only exception to this trend is Australopithecus sediba, which clusters with Homo taxa with craniodental characters but not with postcranial characters. Overall, however, our new characters provide excellent corroboration of previous baraminological analyses. ABSTRACT KEYWORDS hominoids, primates, paleoanthropology, baraminology
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