The Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism (2023)

characters and should therefore continue to show Au. sediba separated from Homo. Thus, we might cautiously interpret our present results as consistent with previous classifications of Au. sediba as human. An alternative perspective on Au. sediba might invoke some form of neoteny or paedomorphosis to argue that juvenile australopiths might more closely resemble adult Homo than mature australopiths. If that is the case, it is possible that the craniodental characteristics exaggerate the resemblance between Au. sediba and Homo because the principal source of cranial information from Au. sediba is a juvenile skull. Thus, when considering craniodental characters alone, Au. sediba closely clusters with members of Homo, while examination of postcranial characters creates more of a division between Homo and Australopithecus, including Au. sediba. A complete adult skull might support placing Au. sediba outside of the human holobaramin. While this is an interesting possibility, it does not account for the fact that Au. sediba appears in the Homo cluster with the combined data (Figures 10 and 11), where the known postcranial characters outnumber the known craniodental characteristics. At this point, a mature Au. sediba skull is likely needed to resolve these questions. Future research on hominin baraminology ought to focus on improving our sample of characters and character states as well as expanding methodologically into morphometrics. While the craniodental and postcranial characters have roughly the same proportion of characters scored (61.9% and 65.7% respectively), the individual taxa vary considerably in their taxic relevance. For example, chimpanzees, gorillas, and Homo sapiens have taxic relevance of only 0.749, 0.798, and 0.893 for the full craniodental character matrix, which is unnecessary. Similarly, Neandertals have a taxic relevance of only 0.621 for the full craniodental set, despite the existence of many well-documented and accessible skulls. The craniodental character matrix could readily be filled out to a much greater extent, which would theoretically provide a much better understanding of the human holobaramin based on craniodental characters. At the same time, additional postcranial characters could be generated, especially when information about the Little Foot skeleton becomes more readily accessible. With the relative completeness of the Little Foot skeleton, the postcranial taxic relevance of Au. africanus s.l. should increase to near 1, but the skeleton is presently unreconstructed and mostly unavailable in public 3D scanning databases. We were able to glean only limited information from the published descriptions and photographs of the skeleton. Additional efforts could also be made to fill out the Au. afarensis character states. We were able to evaluate a second generation cast of AL 288-1, as well as casts of material from AL 333, but information on the Dikika juvenile and adult Kadanuumuu skeletons is less accessible. Finally, morphometrics has been applied only sparingly in baraminology but may represent an important methodological addition to our toolkit. If informal human cognition represents an important ingredient in identifying baramins (Sanders and Wise 2003), then cognition operates primarily on the basis of shape and form rather than individual occurrence of characters. Due to the widespread availability of discrete character-based data used for phylogenetic analyses, discrete character-based methods have dominated baraminology for twenty years. Serious efforts should be made to expand to the study of form and shape, which can be afforded by morphometrics. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was supported by a grant from the Genesis Fund and by donor gifts to Core Academy of Science. 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