There are many different techniques by which different hominin species are classified. Collard and Wood (2000) tested the phylogenetic utility of quantitative rather than qualitative craniodental data to assess the likely reliability of standard hominin cranial and dental characters for interspecific and intergeneric phylogenetic reconstruction. They used hominin cladistic methods to analyze comparable characters from two groups of extant primates: the higher primate group most closely related to fossil hominins - hominoids, and the Old World monkey tribe consisting of baboons, mangabeys and macaques - the papionins. The resulting cladograms were then judged against the groups= consensus molecular phylogenies, with the hypothesis that congruence between morphological and molecular phylogenies would indicate equivalent hominin fossil evidence yields reliable phylogenies, and incongruence would indicate the opposite.
The hypothesis proposed by Collard and Wood was not supported by the parsimony analyses of the two quantitative data sets. The hominoid data resulted in a cladogram with a branching pattern different from that of the hominoid molecular cladogram. Similarly, the papionin cladogram obtained from the craniodental data differed from that of the papionin molecular cladogram. Using the qualitative data, the parsimony analysis of the hominoid qualitative matrix agreed with the hominoid molecular cladogram only in locating Hylobates as the basal hominoid, but differed in the grouping of Homo and Pongo in one clade and with Pan and Gorilla in a second. The hypothesis was similarly not supported by bootstrap analysis.
Overall, the results of the parsimony and bootstrap tests indicate that cladistic analyses based on standard craniodental characters are not reliable for reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships of the hominoids, papionins and so of the fossil hominins. They also showed that these tests can lead to mis...