resulting in strongly negative silhouette widths for Au africanus s.l. and average silhouette widths between 0.3 and 0.35. In contrast, the two-cluster fuzzy analysis yielded a hard partition that placed H. floresiensis, Au. africanus s.l., Au. afarensis, Ardipithecus, chimpanzee, and gorilla in a cluster separate from Homo + Au. sediba using both simple matching and Jaccard distances (average silhouette widths 0.39 and 0.38 respectively). At higher cluster numbers, fuzzy analysis again splits up the Homo + Au. sediba cluster, causing the average silhouette width to drop to 0.22 and below. Unsurprisingly, the 3D MDS results closely resemble those of the full craniodental character matrix, with a cluster of Homo taxa closely adjacent to Au. sediba (Figure 6). Extant apes and the other two Australopithecus species are not particularly close to the Homo cluster nor to each other. These patterns are observed for MDS using both simple matching and Jaccard distances. Postcranial characters. The postcranial character matrix contains 239 characters scored for 14 taxa. Of the 3,346 possible character states, 2,197 are scored, making the matrix 65.7% complete. Character relevance ranges from 0.214 to 1, with a median of 0.643. Taxic relevance ranges from 0.222 (Ar. ramidus) to 0.983 (gorilla), with a median of 0.687 (Table 1). Only four taxa have taxic relevance less than 0.4 (Ar. ramidus, H. georgicus, H. habilis, and H. naledi). The distance correlation results using the postcranial characters closely resemble the distance correlation results using the craniodental characters (Figure 7). For both distance metrics and correlation types, there is a large cluster that consists of most of the Homo taxa. Homo floresiensis never shares significant distance correlation with any other taxa. Using Pearson correlations, Homo habilis only shares significant, positive distance correlation with Homo naledi in both distance metrics. Using Spearman correlations, Homo habilis shares significant, positive correlation with Homo naledi using Jaccard distances and with Homo naledi and Homo georgicus using simple matching distances. With Pearson correlations, Au. sediba also shares no significant, positive correlation with any other taxa using both simple matching and Jaccard distances. In contrast, Au. sediba shares significant, positive distance correlation with Au. africanus s.l. using Spearman correlations on simple matching distances. Using Spearman correlations on Jaccard distances, Au. sediba shares significant, positive correlation with both Au. africanus s.l. and Homo naledi. With all correlation types and distance metrics, chimpanzees, gorillas, and Ar. ramidus form a single cluster that shares significant, negative correlation with the members of the large Homo cluster. Medoid partitioning produced the same clusters for both Jaccard and simple matching distances (Figure 8). With only two clusters, medoid partitioning placed all Australopithecus and Homo taxa in the same cluster, with chimpanzee, gorilla, and Ardipithecus in the Figure 7. Distance correlation results for postcranial characters. Correlations and distance metrics are shown in the diagram. Filled squares indicate significant, positive distance correlation. Open circles indicate significant, negative correlation. WOOD AND BRUMMEL Hominin Baraminology Reconsidered 2023 ICC 258
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