Proposal
The recent discovery and description of Australopithecus sediba proved controversial among creationists after Wood (2010) broke with the majority and proclaimed it human based on an analysis of craniodental characters using statistical baraminology. Since creationists often judge postcranial characters more significant than craniodental characters, a re-analysis of the hominin holobaramin was undertaken using 78 postcranial characters published by Berger, et al. (2010) and 25 characters of the hand published by Kivell, et al. (2011). These character sets, along with subsets of the original craniodental characters evaluated by Wood (2010) were used to calculate baraminic distance correlations (BDC) and multidimensional scaling (MDS). The inconclusive results raise questions about the value of using correlation and clustering methods to identify holobaramins.
Keywords
Baraminology, baraminic distance, multidimensional scaling, human, paleoanthropology, baramin, Australopithecus sediba
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Recommended Citation
Wood, Todd C.
(2013)
"Australopithecus Sediba, Statistical Baraminology, and Challenges to Identifying the Human Holobaramin,"
Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 7, Article 16.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol7/iss1/16