Statistical baraminology studies of the fossil hominins began in 2010 with a provocative paper that identified a tentative holobaramin of humans that included such surprising taxa as Homo habilis and Australopithecus sediba. Subsequent research on Homo naledi reinforced the membership of this holobaramin, and recent studies with an expanded dataset and additional clustering methods also confirmed the original results. Nevertheless, the last decade of research has focused almost entirely on craniodental characteristics, which fall short of the holistic ideal of baraminology research. Past work with postcranial characters suffered from a small sample size, a small number of characters, and a bias towards hand characters, and was therefore inconclusive.
We therefore assembled a new character matrix of postcranial characters based on published photographs and descriptions of key fossils, digital scans, casts, and original specimens. Our matrix contains 239 characters scored for fourteen taxa, and 65.7% of all characters have been scored. The characters sample nearly every significant postcranial element, and the taxon sample includes eight members of genus Homo, three members of genus Australopithecus, Ardipithecus ramidus, and the ape outgroups Pan and Gorilla. Taxon relevance currently ranges from 22.2% for Ar. ramidus to 97.9% for Gorilla. Overall, this matrix promises to be an excellent new resource for better understanding the human holobaramin.
Our preliminary results using standard baraminic distance correlation on the new matrix implies that the previously recognized baraminic groups are confirmed with postcranial characters. The only exception is Au. sediba, which at present is not correlated with any other taxa. H. floresiensis also continues to show no correlation with any other taxa. We plan to do additional work with the full suite of BARCLAY options, including Jaccard distances, Spearman correlations, medoid partitions, and fuzzy analysis, to further characterize the hominin clusters.
Since this work is based on a completely new postcranial character matrix it is unquestionably unique, and the International Conference on Creationism is a particularly suitable and visible platform for its publication. The further development of hominin baraminology is inextricably linked to the creation model of origins as the first step in reinterpreting putative evidence for “human evolution” in the context of our special creation. Past research has continually supported a clear recognition of a uniquely human group of taxa, and this research will likely do the same.