leading interpretations of phylogenetic hypotheses based on craniodental evidence and that paleoanthropologists should not rely on them.
A later study by Gibbs, Collard and Wood (2000) looked at soft-tissue characters to see if they were more reliable than craniodental characters for reconstructing phylogenetic relationships in higher primate species and genera. They used cladistic methods to analyze 197 soft-tissue characters for the extant hominoids and judged the resulting phylogenetic hypothesis against the groups= consensus molecular phylogeny, widely accepted as accurate. This assumes that a match between the morphologic and the molecular phylogenies would be evidence that the morphological evidence is also reliable. Incongruence between the two would indicate that it is not.
In contrast to the craniodental analyses, both the parsimony and bootstrap tests showed that the morphological and molecular phylogenies were in agreement. The analysis resulted in a single parsimonious cladogram with a branching pattern matching that of the molecular cladogram. The authors give two possible explanations for why soft-tissue characters would agree with molecular phylogeny while craniodental data do not. First, it has been shown that in rhombomere quail-to-chick grafts, each rhombomere remains coherent throughout ontogeny, with rhombomere-specific matching of muscle connective tissue and their attachment sites for all branchial and tongue muscles, despite changes in the shape of skeletal elements which may obscure phylogeny. Secondly, homoiology has been shown to affect osseous morphologies, whereas it may play little role in soft-tissue characters. However, they point out that other factors must be involved because dental enamel is not subject to homoiology.
Goodman et al (1999) looked at the classification of hominoids at
...