Convoluted human evolution: H. naledi branch (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 17, 2016, 00:55 (3082 days ago) @ David Turell

Analysis is still going on about this recently discovered hominin, and trying to fit them into the human bush, which keeps getting bushier:-http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2016/06/what-is-homo-naledi-anyway.html-"There's a new study on the phylogeny of Homo naledi published today in the August issue of Journal of Human Evolution (it's a preprint). The study is written by Mana Dembo and colleagues. They compiled a massive matrix of 391 characters (a supermatrix), all from the skull and teeth. They scored these characters on 22 different hominins and chimps and gorillas. For H. naledi, they compiled only 123 of those characters from the original bones at Wits (Dembo was on the H. naledi research team). That's considerably more than the 87 published in the supplemental material of Berger's original description of H. naledi, which I used previously to do my own phylogenetic analysis.-***-"They did two sorts of studies. In the first, they just looked for the best phylogenetic model, which I've copied below (on the left, from their Figure 2). In this tree, H. naledi ends up basal to a clade that includes modern humans, Neandertals, H. heidelbergensis, and the poorly known H. antecessor (which is thought by some to be ancestral to H. heidelbergensis and by others to BE H. heidelbergensis). In their second analysis, they specifically tested alternative trees that tested the specific relationships of H. naledi. They found that H. naledi is definitely a member of Homo, but they couldn't rule out several alternative trees to the one shown, indicating that the precise phylogenetic position of H. naledi within Homo could not be conclusively determined.-***-"Dembo et al. also report a possible date for Homo naledi of around 900,000 years ago, based on fossil dates and their model of character changes. I'm not that excited about this date, since the 95% high posterior density interval ran from 2.4 million years ago to the present. So basically, there's a pretty good chance Homo naledi lived some time in the past 2.4 million years, according to conventional dating, which we already knew."-Comment: The human bush has all sorts of early groups. It fits the shotgun fashion of all of evolution. This website is from a creationist source, but it accepts the great age of these fossils. I see no reason to presume, if God wanted humans, ask why the bush? All of evolution is a bush. It is God's pattern of development.