Australopithecus Categorizing
Categorizing ancients species into clades is a tricky business. The scientific community will always disagree about one factor or another and as D. Curnoe states “Another problem with coding character states is the handling of variation within species. While this form of variation is usually ignored by palaeoanthropologists, when characters are recognized as varying, their treatment as a separate state adds considerable error to cladograms.” (Curnoe 2003) D. Curnoe is an example of an extreme clumper wishing to look through the fossil record with out the tiresome, and not always effect categorizing. I personally find myself on this side of the court in multiple occasions. Within the genus Homo, as ancient man becomes more and more modern, categorizing becomes especially tricky, not every species follows the “proposed synapomorphies of homo”.
…show more content…
The discoverer or the A. sediba claims that it is a “Australiopith with Homo like characteristics”. The A. sediba falls into a funny place on the cladistic time line, it shares traits with both genus’. Dr. Lee Berger and his associates decided on the classifications, based on “a combination of primitive and derived characters of the cranium and postcranium” (Berger et al., 2009). There is not doubt however that A. sediba does share some of the “proposed synapomorphies of homo” that where discussed, most namely the reduction in tooth size. While some part of me believes the categorizing of a species we do not have a larger amount of information on is arbitrary, I do believe that the classification was made by the discoverer, to the best of his knowledge, and so we should accept it for the time being, however that does not mean that it isn't subject to change in the future as we discover more about the
The discoverer or the A. sediba claims that it is a “Australiopith with Homo like characteristics”. The A. sediba falls into a funny place on the cladistic time line, it shares traits with both genus’. Dr. Lee Berger and his associates decided on the classifications, based on “a combination of primitive and derived characters of the cranium and postcranium” (Berger et al., 2009). There is not doubt however that A. sediba does share some of the “proposed synapomorphies of homo” that where discussed, most namely the reduction in tooth size. While some part of me believes the categorizing of a species we do not have a larger amount of information on is arbitrary, I do believe that the classification was made by the discoverer, to the best of his knowledge, and so we should accept it for the time being, however that does not mean that it isn't subject to change in the future as we discover more about the