Ape or Human? How Creationists Sort the Fossils

Wood, Todd Charles.  “Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin.”  Answers Research Journal 3:71–90.  May 5, 2010.  The founding paper of hominin statistical baraminology, by the young-earth biologist who developed the method.  Wood re-analysed eight published skull-and-tooth character tables, compiled by mainstream researchers, and found habilis, rudolfensis and sediba grouped with Homo and apart from the other australopiths and the apes.  It also surveys earlier creationist placements and lists its own weaknesses.

1. 1a.

   Page 71:  “Results indicate that hominins may be divided into as many as four different holobaramins: (1) the genus Homo (including Australopithecus sediba), (2) the genus Paranthropus, (3) Australopithecus africanus, and (4) Gorilla, Pan, Australopithecus afarensis, and Australopithecus garhi.” ↩

2. 1b.

   Section Discussion:  “Homo floresiensis was also included in the inconclusive Argue et al. (2009) dataset. Their cladistic analysis would seem to place H. floresiensis among the homininans, although bootstrap support was exceptionally poor. Creationist opinion on H. floresiensis differs. Hartwig-Scherer (2005) and Wise (2005) consider it a legitimate human species, but Line (2006) believes that it was a microcephalic H. sapiens. This debate also continues among professional paleoanthropologists … but it is immaterial to the question of whether H. floresiensis is human, which creationists agree that it is.” ↩

3. 1c.

   Section The Human Holobaramin:  “At this point, the precise status of the Dmanisi hominids will have to await further analysis.” ↩

4. 1d.

   Page 86:  “but the central question of what makes a “good” BDC/MDS dataset remains unanswered.” ↩

5. 1e.

   Page 81:  “The position of Au. sediba is especially clear. It was positively correlated with all Homo species (with bootstrap values >90%) and did not positively correlate with any australopiths. Even conventional paleoanthropologists disagree on the classification of sediba (see Balter 2010). In light of the present findings, it seems more appropriate to refer sediba to genus Homo.” ↩ ↩

6. 1f.

   “among the most knowledgeable creationist scholars, there is a general consensus that the human holobaramin includes Homo sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, and H. erectus, that australopiths are apes, and that the status of H. habilis is uncertain.” ↩

7. 1g.

   Page 71:  “The divergence of opinion among creationists has been exploited by anticreationists (for example, Isaak 2007, p. 106; Miller 2008, pp. 93–95). If humans truly evolved gradually from nonhuman ancestors, then it would come as no surprise that we would have difficulty drawing the line between “human” and “ape.”” ↩ ↩

8. 1h.

   Section Discussion, The Human Holobaramin:  “Despite these contradictory opinions, the present results strongly support the classification of all three species in the human holobaramin. … The human holobaramin here described includes only the species or specimens included in the datasets, namely H. sapiens, H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. rudolfensis, H. habilis, H. neanderthalensis, “Au.” sediba, and H. heidelbergensis … First, although holobaramins are supposed to be defined from “holistic” data, all of the datasets used in this study contain only craniodental data.”  Table 3:  The table lists H. floresiensis, H. antecessor and the Dmanisi hominid under "Possible additional taxa" of the human holobaramin. ↩ ↩

9. 1i.

   Page 85:  “Based on BDC results alone, the Paranthropus species appear to be a holobaramin, but the MDS results imply that there may be a separation between P. robustus/boisei and P. aethiopicus.”  “The robust australopiths (genus Paranthropus) can be provisionally classified as one holobaramin, and Au. africanus comprises a second potential holobaramin. Au. afarensis and Au. garhi appear to be part of Hartwig-Scherer’s basic type “Gorillinae,” which includes chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas.” ↩

10. 1j.

    Page 81:  “As noted above, Hartwig-Scherer (1999) considers H. habilis an australopith, but Lubenow (2004, pp. 299–301) and Line (2005a) believe some H. habilis specimens might be human. Additional creationists who reject the human status of H. habilis include Gish (1995, p. 279), Hummer (1979), Mehlert (1996), Murdock (2006), and Young (2006). Likewise, though Lubenow (2004, pp. 328–329) and Cuozzo (1977) believe H. rudolfensis to be human, Hartwig-Scherer and Brandt (2007) consider it a kind of ape.” ↩

11. 1k.

    Page 86:  “Any model of post-Babel distribution must account for the appearance and disappearance of these human species in stratigraphic order.”  “Third, the dispersal of the human population from Babel would presumably have been led by H. habilis and H. rudolfensis, specimens of which appear stratigraphically lower than any other human species.” ↩

12. 1l.

    Page 83:  “Though the present research unequivocally groups H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, and “Au.” sediba with other species of Homo, this should certainly not be considered definitive.”  Page 84:  “It is possible that inclusion of postcranial characters in future baraminological analyses might support the separation of H. habilis and “Au.” sediba from the human holobaramin.” ↩

13. 1m.

    Page 72:  “Second, there should be a discontinuity or at least a lack of continuity between the Homo monobaramin and species of the genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus (the so-called robust australopiths).” ↩

14. 1n.

    Page 85:  “Au. africanus is never correlated with Au. afarensis.”  “The robust australopiths (genus Paranthropus) can be provisionally classified as one holobaramin, and Au. africanus comprises a second potential holobaramin.” ↩

15. 1o.

    Page 81:  “Most surprising, three controversial taxa appear to be unequivocally grouped with the homininans: Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba.”  “Despite these contradictory opinions, the present results strongly support the classification of all three species in the human holobaramin.” ↩ ↩ ↩

16. 1p.

    “Homo erectus (sensu lato, including H. ergaster) is viewed as human by Hartwig-Scherer (1998), Lubenow (2004, chap. 12), and Wise (2005).  In contrast, Gish (1995, pp. 304–305) and Bowden (1981, pp. 208–210) view H. erectus as a mix of ape and human specimens, and Cuozzo (1998, p. 101) labeled H. erectus an ape.” ↩ ↩

Foley, Jim.  “Comparison of all skulls.”  TalkOrigins Archive, Fossil Hominids FAQ.  Oct 28, 2008.  The standard skeptic's statement of the argument this article tests.  Foley, who ran the Fossil Hominids FAQ, tabulated how a dozen creationist sources from 1976 to 2005 classified six well-known skulls (KNM-ER 1813, Java Man, Peking Man, KNM-ER 1470, KNM-ER 3733 and the Turkana Boy) and found at least one dissent on every skull.  Mirror:  Archive.org ↩

1. 2a.

   Section text below the table:  “As this table shows, although creationists are adamant that none of these are transitional and all are either apes or humans, they are not able to agree on which are which.  In fact, there are a number of creationists who have changed their opinion on some fossils.  They do not even appear to be converging towards a consistent opinion.” ↩

2. 2b.

   Section text below the table:  “The recently-discovered Dmanisi skulls overlap the erectus/habilis boundary so perfectly that creationists have almost totally ignored them.”  Foley adds that Line counted all the Dmanisi skulls human and that Lubenow's 2004 fossil charts put the largest with the humans and the two smaller with the apes.  The charts' column headings could not be read in the copy of the book used for this article, so that second claim is not used here. ↩

3. 2c.

   Section text below the table:  “It could be pointed out that evolutionists also disagree on how fossils should be classified, which species they belong to, etc.  True enough.  But according to evolutionary thinking, these fossils come from a number of closely related species intermediate between apes and humans.  If this is so, we would expect to find that some of them are hard to classify, and we do.”  “Creationists, on the other hand, assert that apes and humans are separated by a wide gap.  If this is true, deciding on which side of that gap individual fossils lie should be trivially easy.  Clearly, that is not the case.” ↩ ↩

4. 2d.

   Section Creationist Classifications of Hominid Fossils:  In the table, Java Man (940 cc) and Peking Man (915–1225 cc) are "Ape" for Cuozzo 1998 and Gish 1985;  KNM-ER 1470 (750 cc) is "Ape" for Cuozzo 1998, Gish 1985 and Mehlert 1996 and "Human" for Lubenow 1992;  KNM-ER 3733 (850 cc) and the Turkana Boy (880 cc) are "Ape" for Cuozzo 1998 alone;  KNM-ER 1813 (510 cc) is "Ape" for all but Line 2005, "Human??". ↩ ↩

Lubenow, Marvin L.  Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils.  Baker Books, Grand Rapids.  Revised edition.  2004.  The most-read young-earth book on human fossils, first published in 1992 and revised in 2004.  It sorts the fossils into australopiths, which it calls extinct primates, and true humans, from erectus to the Neanderthals, and it calls habilis a mixture of the two.

1. 3a.

   Page 120:  “Homo habilis is a flawed taxon because it is a mixture of some fossils that might be human (KNM-ER 1470, 1481, and 1590) and other fossils that are definitely not human.” ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 3b.

   Page 299:  “The fossil taxon known as Homo habilis is simply a gang of australopithecines in disguise.”  The chapter section that follows is headed "Homo habilis: The Little Man Who Isn't There." ↩

3. 3c.

   Page 30:  “Homo. Humans are the only living forms in the genus Homo. Biblically, there are no creatures past or present who would qualify for the genus Homo, or “true humans,” other than descendants of Adam.”  From the book's opening account of how humans are classified. ↩ ↩ ↩

4. 3d.

   Page 151:  “In spite of one hundred years of being considered 'animals' and 'missing links,' the Tasmanians continually passed the one and only valid test proving that they were fully human—the test of interfertility with other humans.”  The passage is about the Tasmanians.  The article applies the same test to Neanderthals. ↩

5. 3e.

   Page 301:  “To give extensive coverage to the australopithecine fossil record is unnecessary. The australopithecines are simply extinct primates.” ↩ ↩ ↩

6. 3f.

   Page 329:  “There is no question that bias intervened in the reconstruction of skull 1470. Tucked under, the skull would look much like a modern human. Instead, the face was given an australopithecine slant to make it look more like a transitional form. Having said all that, I still have put a question mark by it. What we can say at the present time is that there is no compelling reason why it could not be human.” ↩ ↩

7. 3g.

   Page 128:  “The cranial capacity of Homo erectus goes from about 780 cc (Gongwangling, China;  Lantian 2, China;  and Dmanisi D22880, Georgia, CIS) to about 1225 cc (the largest Peking Man skull, Zhoukoudian X).”  The book's D22880 is a typo for D2280.  Vekua et al. 2002, which describes D2700 at about 600 cc, is in his endnotes (p. 390, note 5), and the specimen is on his chart on p. 352. ↩

8. 3h.

   Page 127:  “My own conclusion is that Homo erectus and Neandertal are actually the same:  Homo erectus is on the lower end, with regard to size, of a continuum that includes Homo erectus, early Homo sapiens, and Neandertal.” ↩ ↩

9. 3i.

   Page 184:  “To sink, that is, combine, Homo erectus with Homo sapiens means that all of those “species” that allegedly lie between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens on the evolutionary scale should be considered Homo sapiens as well.  These would include early Homo sapiens, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo antecessor, Homo ergaster, and the Neandertals.  Wolpoff is right in stating that all of these should be combined, since they are all fully human.  He is wrong in his belief that Homo erectus and the others evolved into anatomically modern humans and that there is a large time distinction separating them.” ↩ ↩

Line, Peter.  “Fossil evidence for alleged apemen—Part 1:  the genus Homo.”  Journal of Creation 19(1):22–32.  Apr 2005.  A survey of every fossil species placed in Homo, by Creation Ministries International's principal writer on human fossils.  It sorts each into human or extinct ape, calls habilis an invalid taxon, and puts 1470 on the human side, a view Line reversed in 2013.

1. 4a.

   Page 22:  “Therefore, all the supposed apemen belong either to the genus Homo, and are descendants of Adam and Eve, or they belong to extinct apes.”  Page 22, abstract:  “The differences in morphological features of the fossil species included in Homo, excluding the invalid taxon Homo habilis, are believed to represent, among other factors, genetic variation within the one human kind.” ↩ ↩

2. 4b.

   Page 24:  “Using the rule of logic, if fossils attributed to erectus were not those of ‘apemen’, but fully human, then the case for human evolution essentially collapses, as there is an unbridgeable morphological gap between the australopithecine apes and erectus humans, with no missing links in between.” ↩ ↩

3. 4c.

   Page 23:  “From a creationist position, habilis is an invalid taxon, being instead a collection of assorted fossils that can either be classified as humans (e.g. as erectus) or as australopithecine apes.”  “If the evaluation of KNM-ER 1813 by White and Wolpoff is correct, then this cranium, with a cranial capacity of only about 509 cm3, may have belonged to a very small human.”  “the cranium of the latter is much more likely that of a human than an ape.”  "The latter" is KNM-ER 1470. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

Rupe, Christopher, and John Sanford.  Contested Bones.  FMS Publications.  2017.  A young-earth survey of the hominin fossils by Christopher Rupe and John Sanford, a retired Cornell plant geneticist.  It predicts that the fossils fall into two groups, apes and humans, and reads the supposed transitional species either as humans or as mixtures of ape and human bones.  A second edition appeared in 2019.

1. 5a.

   Page 161:  “Zinj is now universally recognized by the paleoanthropological community to be a robust australopithecine.”  “Zinj has since been appropriately reclassified as Paranthropus boisei (alternatively Au. boisei), an extinct ape far removed from the lineage of man.” ↩

2. 5b.

   Page 185:  “Consistent with the funnel-shaped upper thorax, the upper limb bones attributed to Sediba are unmistakably ape-like, revealing an anatomy perfectly suited for tree-dwelling life.”  The bones listed include the scapula, or shoulder blade. ↩

3. 5c.

   Page 60:  “This has led to taxonomic ambiguity and has opened the door for australopith (ape) skulls to be wrongly interpreted as Erectus.  There is at least one possible example of this in the Dmanisi site (skull D4500).  However, as we will demonstrate in this chapter, most of the remains attributed to Erectus are fully human and should therefore be reclassified as Homo sapiens, as the 'lumpers' in the field advocate.” ↩ ↩

4. 5d.

   Page 195:  “What Berger and colleagues reconstructed is not a new species but rather appears to be a chimeric skeleton (a mixture of human and non-human bones).” ↩ ↩

5. 5e.

   Page 45:  “The nuclear DNA suggested they were Neanderthal, yet the mitochondrial DNA indicated a Denisovan ancestor.  This supports the interpretation that they had different genetic histories yet could all interbreed, and are all one species—Homo sapiens.” ↩

6. 5f.

   Page 91:  “We have shown that Erectus is just a variant of Homo sapiens. Hobbit can be understood as a extreme version of Erectus (more isolated, more inbred, more dwarfed).”  "a extreme" is the source's wording. ↩

7. 5g.

   Page 208:  “It is increasingly realized that many generations of inbreeding, and long-term starvation produces human populations that will display pathologies, dramatically reduced body size, and very dramatically reduced brain size.  Naledi appears to be an example of this process happening within an Erectus (fully human) population.” ↩

8. 5h.

   Page 173:  “Habilis is not a real species.”  “Habilis is a “wastebasket taxon” —a commixture of Australopithecus and Homo bones.” ↩ ↩

9. 5i.

   Page 27:  “In section I we will examine the hominin bones of the human type (Neanderthal, Erectus, and Hobbit). In section II we will examine the bones of the ape-type (Ardi and Lucy). In section III we will look at the bones of the supposed “bridge” species (Habilis, Sediba, and Naledi).” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

10. 5j.

    Page 168:  “What they found was a body that was distinctly ape-like (Australopithecus).”  Page 259:  “A set of anatomically modern leg bones (KNM-ER 1472, 1475, and 1481) were also found during the 1972 field season”.  Page 172:  “Paleo-experts observe some of the bones assigned to Habilis align neatly with the genus Homo (such as a partial foot designated OH 8), and may actually belong to Erectus (Figure 5). Yet other bones align better with Australopithecus (such as OH 62).”  Page 264:  “Unfortunately, when human bones are found too early in the fossil record, such bones are either reclassified (i.e, Mary Leakey’s Homo bones and footprints); or re-dated (Richard Leakey’s 1470 skull and stone tools); or are ignored”. ↩ ↩ ↩

11. 5k.

    Page 45:  “The “Pit of Bones” demonstrates that all three major hominin “species” (Erectus, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens) coexisted in the same place at the same time, and can be arranged into a morphological continuum, reflecting diversity within a single, interbreeding population.” ↩ ↩

12. 5l.

    Page 341:  “Our alternative model predicts that hominin fossils should fall into two groups—apes and humans. This would be because God created man separately from the apes (rather than apes evolving gradually into humans). And so we should not expect to find any credible transitional hominin types. There is no need for a bridge species between Australopithecus and Homo.”  From the closing chapter, "A Simpler Model". ↩ ↩ ↩

The count uses the master table in Part 2, one column per writer or group, with each writer's latest stated placement.  Codes:  human, ape (non-human), mixed (the taxon holds both), and undecided (unresolved, uncertain, a question mark, or "questionable").  A row is unanimous when every column that states a placement gives the same code.  Eight of fifteen rows are unanimous:  Ardipithecus, A. africanus, Paranthropus, Dmanisi, H. erectus, the Middle Pleistocene forms, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.  Seven split:  A. afarensis (seven ape, two mixed), A. sediba (four ape, two mixed, two undecided), H. habilis (four mixed, two human, one ape, one undecided), H. rudolfensis and 1470 (four human, two undecided, one ape), H. floresiensis (seven human, one ape, one undecided), H. luzonensis (three human, one ape) and H. naledi (four human, two ape).  In five rows one writer says human and another says ape:  habilis, rudolfensis, floresiensis, luzonensis and naledi.  The table holds 104 stated placements;  42 of them fall in the six disputed Homo-or-sediba rows.  Across the 36 pairs of columns, two writers who both place a taxon give the same placement 234 times out of 329, 71 percent;  leaving out the pair of Wood's statistics and Ross, Brummel and Wood, who share an author, it is 223 of 317, 70 percent.  The lowest pairwise scores belong to the Institute for Creation Research against Wood's statistics and against O'Micks (none of three) and to Answers in Genesis against Wood's statistics (four of eight).  The count is reproduced by research/agree.ts beside this article (run with deno run). ↩ ↩

Wood, Todd Charles.  “An Evaluation of Homo naledi and "Early" Homo from a Young-Age Creationist Perspective.”  Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B:  Life Sciences 6:14–30.  2016.  Wood's second hominin analysis, on a larger skull-and-tooth table that includes naledi.  It repeats the 2010 result, places naledi with Homo, and concludes that creationists had underestimated how variable the human kind was.

1. 7a.

   Page 23:  “For example, Wise (2005) argued based on usage of stone tools and fire that the Flores fossils referred to Homo floresiensis are the remains of true humans. In addition, Wise noted that their location east of Wallace’s line implied dispersal by boats, reflecting advanced technology. Thus, although Wood’s (2010) baraminological analysis of H. floresiensis was inconclusive, we may still include the Flores form in the human holobaramin.” ↩

2. 7b.

   Page 17:  “T.C. Wood (2010) attributed the creationist disagreements to the same problems that plague conventional anthropology: fragmentary specimens and small sample sizes.” ↩ ↩ ↩

3. 7c.

   Page 21:  “The present results show the same correlations, including Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis.”  Page 22:  “Consequently, if the present study is correct in its conclusions, young-age creationists have seriously underestimated the variability of the human holobaramin.” ↩ ↩ ↩

Reeves, Colin R.  “A Critical Evaluation of Statistical Baraminology:  Part 1, Statistical Principles.”  Answers Research Journal 14:261–269.  2021.  A critique of statistical baraminology by a creationist statistician, published in Answers in Genesis's own research journal.  It argues that the method's distance measures and significance tests lack a sound statistical basis, and it names the sediba result as an example.

1. 8a.

   Section Abstract:  “that these methods are based on a shaky understanding of statistical principles, and that their use ought to be abandoned.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 8b.

   Page 265:  “One of the most startling of these, Wood’s claim that the hominim Australopithecus sediba is human, has been severely critiqued by Menton, Habermehl and DeWitt (2010).”  "Hominim" is the source's spelling.  Page 267:  “treat conclusions with much greater caution than has sometimes been the case (cf. Australopithecus sediba).” ↩

Hartwig-Scherer, Sigrid.  “Apes or Ancestors?  Interpretations of the Hominid Fossil Record Within Evolutionary & Basic Type Biology.”  Mere Creation:  Science, Faith & Intelligent Design, 212–235.  InterVarsity Press.  Edited by William A. Dembski.  1998.  A chapter in an intelligent-design collection by a German creationist anthropologist.  It treats the hominins as members of created "basic types", defined by the ability to hybridise, and judges fossils by anatomy because hybridisation cannot be tested on them.

1. 9a.

   Page 223:  “The ancestral form of the basic type Australopithecinae may have displayed arboreal as well as bipedal locomotor abilities, had mainly unique cranial and facial traits and possessed a brain larger than extant apes of its body size. It is expected that during the radiation of the basic type, different species increased different trends to different degrees. Some have expanded the arboreal trend to the expense of the bipedal activities, others the brain size, or exceeded the special australopithecine traits such as dished faces and megadontia (A. robustus, A. boisei, A. arethiopicus).”  "arethiopicus" is the book's misprint for aethiopicus. ↩ ↩

2. 9b.

   Page 228:  “If OH 62 is a specimen of Homo habilis, this taxon should be excluded from the genus Homo sensu stricto.”  “It is suggested that the habilis complex may be an artificial combination of two inferred basic types: the Homininae (H. erectus: mainly the postcranial specimens of Kenya) and the Australopithecinae (habilis group). Whether the rudolfensis group belongs to the australopithecine basic type or to the human basic type or even to a third, hitherto undefined basic type is not yet settled.” ↩ ↩ ↩

3. 9c.

   Page 216:  “A given set of species belong to a basic type if they are connected directly or indirectly through hybridization. Hybridization data are available only for limited cases. In other cases supplementary membership criteria, such as morphological, behavioral or ontogenetic evidence, have to be used. For fossils, the morphological data base is the only evidence available.” ↩

Line, Peter.  “Ancient Chinese skull.”  Creation 46(1):46–47.  Jan 2024.  A magazine piece on the Hualongdong skull HLD 6.

1. 10a.

   Paragraph 4:  “However, this does not suggest that more branches (or species) need to be added to the false evolutionary human family tree.  Rather, it indicates that the ‘archaic’ humans (e.g., Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus) and ‘modern’ humans were interbreeding with each other.  Thus, by definition they were the same biological species.”  The piece has no subheadings.  The paragraph count leaves out the two indented quotations. ↩

Menton, David N. et al.  “Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin:  Discussion.”  Answers Research Journal 3:153–158.  Aug 25, 2010.  Three separately signed replies to Wood 2010 in the same journal, by the anatomist David Menton (pp. 153–155), Anne Habermehl (pp. 155–156) and the biologist David DeWitt (pp. 156–158).  All three reject Wood's placement of sediba with humans.

1. 11a.

   Page 153:  “This is further complicated by the fact that these presumed “similarities” are the biased opinions of evolutionists.”  Menton's section. ↩

2. 11b.

   Pages 155–156:  “The enthusiasm of baraminologists for using statistical analysis to determine humanness should perhaps be tempered; indeed, this paper raises very real doubt whether statistical methods should be applied to baraminology at all.”  From Habermehl's reply. ↩

3. 11c.

   Page 158:  “Based on the discussion above, it would appear that the statistical baraminology results placing Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba within the human holobaramin is a false positive result. This is most clearly demonstrated for sediba and therefore raises questions about habilis and rudolfensis.”  From DeWitt's reply. ↩

4. 11d.

   Page 155:  “Will we now accept these obvious apes (such as Australopithecus sediba—and, yes, Wood is totally correct that this sure is a surprise) as human, because somebody’s manipulation of statistics tells us that we should do this?”  Habermehl's section.  She holds, following Jack Cuozzo, that the long-lived Neanderthals are the only early humans. ↩

5. 11e.

   Page 158:  “These changes would bring 1470 more in line with australopithecines.”  “is a false positive result”.  Page 153:  “while others like Homo habilis are fragmentary fossils of questionable relationship to man.”  The page 158 quotations are DeWitt's section;  the page 153 quotation is Menton's. ↩ ↩

6. 11f.

   Page 153:  “Like other creationists who have commented on Australopithecus sediba (Line 2010; Thomas 2010 a, b), I do not agree that it is human, and neither do most evolutionists.”  Menton's section. ↩

Ham, Ken.  “Homo luzonensis—a New Human Species Discovered in the Philippines?”  Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham Blog.  Apr 15, 2019.  Answers in Genesis's response to Détroit et al. 2019.  It prints the verdict and the bone-by-bone notes of the anatomist David Menton, with a comment by the palaeontologist Gabriela Haynes.

1. 12a.

   Section Homo or Ape?:  “Dr. David Menton, an anatomist … studied the paper and concluded, 'This is absolutely not Homo. It's an ape.' Dr. Menton notes that the finger and toe bones bear no resemblance to human fingers and toes, but do resemble the highly curved fingers and toes of Australopithecus”. ↩ ↩

Ham, Ken.  “Did Homo Naledi Create Art and Start Fires?”  Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham Blog.  Jun 15, 2023.  Answers in Genesis's response to the 2023 preprints.

1. 13a.

   Paragraph beginning "First off, we must ask":  “If you look at the skeletal remains of Homo naledi , it’s clear that this creature was just a variety of ape.”  The space before the comma is in the original.  The post goes on to quote Answers in Genesis's 2015 list of the shoulder, finger, hip and rib-cage features. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

Wood, Todd C.  “Baraminology, the Image of God, and Australopithecus sediba.”  Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B:  Life Sciences 1:6–14.  Jul 8, 2011.  Wood's reply to the four creationist critiques of his 2010 result.  He argues that the objections from the image of God and from salvation fail, that Berger's own character list is biased against Homo, and that critics should run their own analyses;  he also concedes the result rests on one data set.

1. 14a.

   Page 12:  “If some creationists are uncomfortable with including A. sediba in the human holobaramin (which they certainly are), they ought to do their own statistical analysis to demonstrate discontinuity between A. sediba and members of the true human holobaramin (whatever species that might encompass).” ↩

2. 14b.

   Page 11:  “In contrast, the equal weighting scheme of statistical baraminology has an advantage, in that it uses “a suite of characters to define ‘human’” rather than reducing “humanness to cranial capacity, limb proportions, ... bipedality,” or any other specific characteristic that might have varied in the past (Wood 2010a).” ↩

Wood, Todd Charles.  “Australopithecus sediba, Statistical Baraminology, and Challenges to Identifying the Human Holobaramin.”  Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Creationism.  Creation Science Fellowship.  Edited by Mark Horstemeyer.  2013.  Wood's own test of his 2010 result using the 78 postcranial characters of the 2010 description and 25 hand characters from 2011.  The test was inconclusive, and Wood questions whether the method can identify created kinds from small samples.  The proceedings paper has no printed page numbers;  pages given are the PDF's.

1. 15a.

   Page 11, section Discussion:  “Turning back to basic anatomical and biological considerations, we still find reasons to doubt the humanity of A. sediba. Carlson, et al. (2011) report that the convolution pattern on the frontal lobes of Australopithecus sediba are typically australopith rather than characteristic of Homo.” ↩ ↩

2. 15b.

   Page 10, section Discussion:  “No analysis of the postcranial characters of Berger, et al. (2010) or Kivell, et al. (2011) revealed any strong affinity between A. sediba and H. sapiens or H. erectus. In fact, in all five BDC analyses of postcranial characters in the present study, A. sediba was neither positively nor negatively correlated with any other taxon.” ↩

Sinclair, P., and Todd Charles Wood.  “Revising Hominin Baraminology with Medoid Partitioning and Fuzzy Analysis.”  Answers Research Journal 14:451–462.  2021.  A re-analysis of two hominin character tables with the cluster methods a creationist critic had asked for.  The 2010 result held under every method and the hobbit stayed unresolved.  Its Table 1 lists creationist opinion on sediba, the hobbit and naledi.

1. 16a.

   Medoid partitioning of the remaining seventeen taxa at k = 3 (three clusters) gave:  all Homo plus Au. sediba; the extant apes plus Ardipithecus ramidus; and the remaining three australopiths.  H. floresiensis was the one genuinely unresolved taxon:  it shared no significant distance correlation, positive or negative, with any other taxon in any of the eight analyses. ↩

2. 16b.

   Section Results:  “This partition consists of three clusters with average silhouette widths ranging from 0.58 to 0.59 (table 2, fig. 2). The first cluster consists of members of the genus Homo together with Au. sediba. The second cluster consists of chimpanzee and the remaining members of the genus Australopithecus. The third cluster contains all three species of the genus Paranthropus.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

3. 16c.

   Page 459:  “We found here that Au. sediba consistently clusters with members of genus Homo, even when using alternative distances and cluster analysis methods.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

4. 16d.

   Section Results:  “For this two-cluster partition, Au. sediba had an individual silhouette width of 0.40, and H. naledi had a silhouette width of 0.49.”  Moving naledi to the non-human cluster gives −0.49;  giving it a cluster of its own gives an average silhouette width of 0.16. ↩ ↩

5. 16e.

   Section Discussion:  “Our intention is not to render a final judgment on the human holobaramin.”  “the human holobaramin consists of the well-characterized human forms of H. sapiens, Neandertals, and H. erectus and probably includes the more fragmentary H. heidelbergensis, H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, H. naledi, and Au. sediba.”  “Finally, O’Micks (2016a) has asserted that postcranial characters ought to be included in baraminological evaluations.  He is unquestionably correct on this point.” ↩ ↩

6. 16f.

   Section Discussion:  “the human holobaramin consists of the well-characterized human forms of H. sapiens, Neandertals, and H. erectus and probably includes the more fragmentary H. heidelbergensis, H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, H. naledi, and Au. sediba.” ↩

7. 16g.

   Page 455:  “We removed the Paranthropus taxa from the character set because they consistently formed a distant cluster, and there is no controversy over the conclusion that these taxa are not human.” ↩ ↩

8. 16h.

   Section Results:  “In all analyses H. floresiensis shares no significant distance correlation, positive or negative, with any of the other taxa, human or nonhuman.” ↩ ↩

9. 16i.

   Page 452, table 1:  "Creationist opinion on the status of Australopithecus sediba, Homo floresiensis, and Homo naledi."  Sediba:  not human, Menton et al. 2010, Line 2010, Thomas 2011, O'Micks 2016a;  mixed, Rupe and Sanford 2017;  human, Wood 2010.  Floresiensis:  not human, O'Micks 2017a;  human, Wise 2005, Line 2006, Wood 2016, Rupe and Sanford 2017.  Naledi:  not human, O'Micks 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c;  mixed, Clarey 2015;  human, Wood 2016 and 2017, Wise 2016, Line 2016, McLain 2017, Rupe and Sanford 2017;  undecided, Nalin 2015. ↩

Wood, Todd Charles, and P. S. Brummel.  “Hominin Baraminology Reconsidered with Postcranial Characters.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, 251–266.  Edited by J. H. Whitmore.  2023.  The first young-earth sorting of the hominins to use the skeleton below the skull:  239 new characters for 14 taxa, analysed alone and with skull characters.  Sediba left the Homo cluster on the skeleton, and naledi, habilis and the hobbit became less clear.

1. 17a.

   Page 264:  “With 72.4% of Au. sediba’s postcranial character states scored, this clustering is unlikely to be a statistical artifact. With the combined craniodental and postcranial characters, Au. sediba clusters consistently with Homo taxa again”.  “This difference between clustering with postcranial characters versus the combined character set cannot be attributed to a bias towards craniodental characters, because only 49% of Au. sediba’s craniodental characters are scored.” ↩ ↩

2. 17b.

   Page 251, section Abstract:  “The only exception to this trend is Australopithecus sediba, which clusters with Homo taxa with craniodental characters but not with postcranial characters.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

3. 17c.

   Page 263:  “In contrast, Homo floresiensis clusters with the Lubenow Core in only 41% of the partitions but co-occurs in 59% of the partitions with Homo habilis.”  The percentages are over 44 clustering runs on the skull, skeleton and combined character sets. ↩ ↩

4. 17d.

   Page 252, table 1:  Postcranial taxic relevance for H. habilis is 0.331, against 0.836 for all craniodental characters.  Page 263:  “Homo naledi clusters with members of the Lubenow Core in at least 84% of the partitions, and H. georgicus clusters with members of the Lubenow Core in at least 82% of the partitions. Homo habilis clusters with the Lubenow Core in 75% to 80% of the partitions.”  H. georgicus is the authors' label for the Dmanisi fossils;  the "Lubenow Core" is H. sapiens, Neanderthals, H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis. ↩ ↩ ↩

5. 17e.

   Page 263:  “Homo sapiens, H. erectus s.l., Neandertals, and H. heidelbergensis cluster together in at least 96% of all partitions.  These four Homo taxa are analogous to the “Lubenow Core” of Ross et al. (2023), if we consider H. heidelbergensis a form of Neandertal.” ↩ ↩ ↩

6. 17f.

   Page 263:  “Australopithecus africanus s.l. clusters with Au. afarensis in 89% of the partitions, but Au. africanus s.l. clusters with Au. sediba in only 46% of our partitions.”  “The first cluster contains chimpanzee, gorilla, and Ardipithecus. The second cluster contains Au. afarensis and Au. africanus s.l. The third cluster contains all Homo taxa and Au. sediba.” ↩ ↩ ↩

7. 17g.

   Page 265:  “At this point, a mature Au. sediba skull is likely needed to resolve these questions.” ↩

8. 17h.

   Page 260:  “For three clusters, fuzzy analysis broke up the Homo taxa to make a cluster of H. floresiensis, H. naledi, H. habilis, and all three Australopithecus taxa for simple matching distances and a cluster of H. habilis, H. naledi, H. floresiensis, and Au. sediba for Jaccard distances.”  From the results for the 239 skeleton characters alone.  Page 263:  “The status of the Australopithecus taxa and H. naledi, H. floresiensis, and H. habilis are less clear.”  “Distance correlation supports placing Homo naledi with other members of Homo, which is confirmed by cluster analysis.”  “With H. naledi and Au. sediba so different from the others postcranially, questions persist about their human status.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

9. 17i.

   Page 263:  “In the case of Homo naledi, cultural evidence of body disposal (Dirks et al. 2010) tentatively confirms their status as human, but with Au. sediba, no such supplemental evidence exists and legitimate uncertainty remains.” ↩ ↩ ↩

O'Micks, J.  “Preliminary baraminological analysis of Homo naledi and its place within the human baramin.”  Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B: Life Sciences 6:31–39.  2016.  O'Micks's first analysis of Homo naledi, run on skull and tooth characters with Wood's method.  It placed naledi in the human kind, a conclusion he reversed later the same year.  Mirror:  Archive.org

1. 18a.

   Page 31:  “Neither data set was sufficient to demonstrate discontinuity among clusters conclusively.  However, in both analyses Homo naledi appears continuous with and fits well within the cluster of Homo species, despite some Australopithecus-like characteristics. … Placement of H. naledi in the human baramin is supported.  Since this is one of the first morphological dataset available for H. naledi and it includes only craniodental characteristics, further baraminological analysis is warranted.” ↩ ↩ ↩

O'Micks, J.  “Likely Discontinuity Between Humans and Non-Human Hominins Based on Endocranial Volume and Body Mass With a Special Focus on Homo naledi:  A Short Analysis.”  Answers Research Journal 10:241–243.  2017.  A short creationist analysis that clusters fourteen hominin species by two numbers each, average brain volume and average body mass.  It puts habilis, naledi and sediba with the australopiths and rudolfensis with the humans.

1. 19a.

   Section Results:  “The second cluster is made up of Homo habilis, Homo naledi, Australopithecus sediba, Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus afarensis, Paranthropus boisei, Paranthropus aethiopicus, and Ardipithecus ramidus.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 19b.

   Section Results:  “With two clusters, the first main cluster is made up of Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis + Homo rudolfensis, Homo erectus, and Homo ergaster.”  The clusters are drawn from two numbers per species, average brain volume and average body mass. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

3. 19c.

   Section Discussion:  “Thus, since H. naledi groups with H. habilis, then transitively, H. naledi is not human, if indeed H. habilis can be assumed to be an australopithecine.” ↩ ↩

Rupe, Christopher.  “"Lucy" and the Pygmy Human Hypothesis.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 62:208–227.  2026.  A paper in a creationist journal by one of the authors of Contested Bones.  It argues that Lucy was a small-bodied human and that the traits usually used to call a fossil an australopith also occur in human fossils, reversing the book's placement of Lucy.

1. 20a.

   Section Abstract:  His thesis is that Lucy was.  “a genetically isolated small-bodied human, drawn from a pygmy population that lived in the Hadar region of East Africa, during the post-Flood African Humid Period.”  He offers the Pygmy Human Hypothesis explicitly against two creationist alternatives he names and rejects: the Quadrupedal Ape Hypothesis (citing Menton 2003 and Oard 2013) and the Bipedal Ape Hypothesis (citing Brummel 2023). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 20b.

   Page 221:  “Once again, curved fingers and toes should not be considered a diagnostic trait since they can occur in humans. For example, finger bones belonging to another small-bodied human were discovered in Callao Cave on the Philippine Island of Luzon (Détroit et al., 2019).”  Page 221, figure 14:  “there can be no question it belonged to the small-bodied human, H. luzonensis”. ↩

3. 20c.

   Page 223:  “Those traits include funnel-shaped (or bell-shaped) thoraxes, laterally flaring ilia, curved phalanges, long arms relative to femur length, small cranial capacity, and cranially oriented glenoid cavities.  However, those traits should not be considered diagnostic of australopithecines since they have been shown to occur in human fossils.”  Rupe is arguing that a small brain does not make a fossil an ape, which is the opposite use from his 2017 book's cranial-capacity range, and that is the point made here. ↩ ↩ ↩

4. 20d.

   Page 221:  “Note that the anatomical association of the MH 2 scapula with a morphologically human hand strongly suggests the scapula is also human.”  Rupe gives the MH2 shoulder joint angle as 131.6°, against 132.3° for Lucy, 142.3° for modern humans and 127.8° for chimpanzees. ↩ ↩

5. 20e.

   Page 220:  “Indeed, it may therefore be another example of a misclassified human pelvis (Figure 13). Supporting this interpretation, the STS 14 pelvis was found with a human-shaped vertebral column with lumbar lordosis (Broom et al., 1950; Johanson and Edgar, 1996). This specimen was classified by paleoanthropologists as Au. africanus (it was considered "too old" to qualify as Homo), a taxonomic designation that creationists have uncritically accepted.”  Earlier on the same page he says Broom compared the Sts 14 pelvis.  “to a pygmy human pelvis”. ↩

6. 20f.

   Page 223:  “This paper proposes that there are more reliable traits that can be used to distinguish human fossils from the true ape-like Australopithecus genus.” ↩ ↩

Ross, Marcus R. et al.  “Human History from Adam to Abraham:  Integrating Paleoanthropology with a Young-Age Creation Perspective.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, 66–87.  Edited by J. H. Whitmore.  2023.  A synthesis by three young-earth scientists, one of them Wood, that combines the statistical results with cultural evidence such as fire, tools and burial.  Its Table 2 summarises the placements of six young-earth treatments and its own.

1. 21a.

   Page 66:  “provisional human status to “Early Homo” (H. habilis and H. rudolfensis), and uncertain status to Au. sediba.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 21b.

   Page 74:  “To the Lubenow core, we feel confident in adding H. heidelbergensis.  Though there remains legitimate uncertainty about this taxon’s validity, the fossils referred to it exhibit subtle differences from Neandertals while maintaining an overall strong resemblance.  Further, preliminary genome studies indicate that H. heidelbergensis is a variant Neandertal, and baraminology studies continue to place H. heidelbergensis fossils among the humans.”  The "Lubenow core" is the authors' name for Homo sapiens, Neandertals and Homo erectus. ↩

3. 21c.

   Page 72:  “The KNM ER 1470 skull (H. rudolfensis), for example, was seen as an ape by some (Mehlert 1999) and human by others (Cuozzo 1977, Lubenow 2004).”  “Given the incomplete state of the evidence from these fossils, it is not surprising that opinions on these matters differ.” ↩ ↩

4. 21d.

   Page 74:  “Furthermore, repeated studies of Paranthropus, a “robust” australopithecine, support recognizing them as their own nonhuman created kind (Wood 2010, Brummel and Wood 2023).” ↩

5. 21e.

   Page 74:  “If the fossils included under this name do represent a single hominin form, then the baraminology clustering studies have never failed to include them among the humans. If, as some creationists contend, H. habilis represents a mix of Australopithecus and Homo remains, their status is less clear. To resolve these questions, a careful examination of the fossils (preferably the originals or high-resolution scans) ought to be made and studies of baraminology with artificially mixed taxa ought to be undertaken. This work also should entail skull KNM ER 1470 and associated remains (referred to H. rudolfensis). Skeletal remains of H. habilis are associated with only Oldowan tools, giving limited support from cultural artifacts.” ↩ ↩ ↩

6. 21f.

   Page 75:  “While the existence of extinct creatures that possessed a mix of traits seen in today’s humans and apes could be seen as very favorable for human evolution, we have seen a wide range of evidence that support classifying nearly all taxa as either ape or human.” ↩

7. 21g.

   Page 74:  “Nevertheless, it seems very clear that Au. afarensis and Au. africanus are not human.” ↩ ↩ ↩

8. 21h.

   Page 74:  “Probable humans include the fossils of Gran Dolina (H. antecessor), H. luzonensis (a diminutive island form attested by a few bones and teeth), and the dragon man cranium (H. longi).” ↩

9. 21i.

   Page 73, table 2:  "Summary of hominin fossil assessments from prominent YEC books and studies."  Seven columns:  Lubenow (1992, 2004);  Hartwig-Scherer (1998);  Cuozzo (1998);  Rupe and Sanford (2017);  Bergman, Line, Tomkins and Biddle (2020);  Sinclair and Wood (2021);  the present study.  Rows as printed:  Ardipithecus ape in every column that states one;  A. afarensis ape except Rupe and Sanford, "mixed";  A. sediba "mixed" (Rupe and Sanford), "ape" (Bergman et al.), "human" (Sinclair and Wood), "uncertain" (present study);  other australopiths and the robust australopiths ape in every column;  H. habilis and H. rudolfensis "mixed" for Lubenow, Rupe and Sanford and Bergman et al., "Possibly mixed" for Hartwig-Scherer, "human" for Sinclair and Wood and the present study;  H. floresiensis human in the four columns that state one;  H. naledi human for Rupe and Sanford, Sinclair and Wood and the present study;  Mid-Pleistocene Homo, H. erectus, Neanderthals human in every column that states one, except Cuozzo's "ape" for H. erectus;  Denisovans human for Rupe and Sanford, Bergman et al. and the present study.  Note 4 says Sinclair and Wood's statistics did not cluster floresiensis with humans, but they "considered the species human based on evidence from cultural artifacts". ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

10. 21j.

    Page 74:  “First and most importantly, creationists remain widely agreed that the Lubenow core is human (Table 2).” ↩ ↩

Reeves, Colin R.  “A Critical Evaluation of Statistical Baraminology:  Part 2, Alternatives and Conceptual and Practical Issues.”  Answers Research Journal 14:271–282.  2021.  The second half of Reeves's critique.  It proposes standard alternatives to the creationist distance methods and works through problems in particular published studies, among them O'Micks's first analysis of Homo naledi.

1. 22a.

   Page 280:  “A similar problem is seen in a particularly acute way in another paper (O’Micks 2016), which attempts a baraminological analysis of the recent hominim discovery know as Homo naledi.”  The "problem" is turning measured quantities into coarse categories before analysing them, which Reeves heads "Unnecessary discretization". ↩

Collard, Mark, and Bernard Wood.  “How reliable are human phylogenetic hypotheses?”  PNAS 97(9):5003–5006.  2000.  A test of the skull-and-tooth family-tree methods used on fossil hominins, run on living apes and monkeys whose relationships DNA has settled.  The skull-and-tooth trees disagreed with the DNA trees, some at high statistical support.  It tests family trees, not baraminology, so it bears on the characters rather than on Wood's statistic.

1. 23a.

   Page 5005:  “More problematically, the tests suggest that such analyses can strongly support phylogenetic hypotheses that are misleading.  For example, the bootstrap-based tests indicate that craniodental data can return impressive levels of statistical support (e.g., 97%) for patterns of phylogenetic relationship that are most likely incorrect.  In other words, cladistic analyses of higher primate craniodental morphology may yield not only 'false-positive' results, but false-positive results that pass, by a substantial margin, the statistical test favored by many researchers.”  The seven clades at or above 70% were 98, 97, 95, 92, 78, 73 and 73. ↩ ↩

Thomas, Brian.  “How Do Hominids Fit with the Bible?”  Institute for Creation Research.  Apr 30, 2020.  A short popular article by an Institute for Creation Research science writer that sorts hominin fossils into apes, mixtures and humans.

1. 24a.

   Paragraph The first group is ape:  “These fossils rightly bear the ape name Australopithecus.” ↩ ↩

2. 24b.

   Paragraph final:  “Homo floresiensis (nicknamed "Hobbit") presented a challenge. The skull and other fragments from a remote island in Indonesia came from a small person with a tiny head. Initial reports declared it a possible ancestor, but later work showed an excellent match between Hobbit and people today who have microcephaly. Diseased humans don't show evolution, just sin's curse on creation.” ↩ ↩

Thomas, Brian, and Chris Rupe.  “Busting the Myth about Lucy.”  Acts & Facts 54(5):18.  Aug 29, 2025.  A short article in the Institute for Creation Research's magazine, written with Rupe three months before his paper on Lucy.  It states the older creationist view that the collection attributed to Lucy's species mixes human and ape bones, citing Contested Bones.

1. 25a.

   The piece's conclusion, verbatim:  “First, some clearly human fossils got lumped into a collection of bones attributed to Lucy's species.  Second, clearly ape fossils got lumped into that same collection.”  Its footnote 4 cites Contested Bones, 2019, p. 113, for the proposition that some researchers recognise that the collection includes both human and ape pieces.  So this is the book-era position with the book as its source, published three months before the Creation Research Society Quarterly paper states a different one. ↩ ↩

Lubenow, Marvin L.  “The Problem with Australopithecus sediba.”  Answers in Depth 5.  Aug 11, 2010.  A short essay by the author of Bones of Contention, the standard young-earth book on human fossils, arguing that sediba is a variety of ape and too young to be a human ancestor.

1. 26a.

   Section final section:  “The most parsimonious explanation regarding Australopithecus sediba is that it and Australopithecus africanus are both extinct varieties of the original Genesis ape kind.” ↩ ↩

Line, Peter.  “Fossil evidence for alleged apemen—Part 2:  non-Homo hominids.”  Journal of Creation 19(1):33–42.  2005.  A young-earth survey of every hominin species outside Homo, by a creationist writer who has published widely on human fossils.  It argues from the mainstream literature that all of them were extinct apes, and it has a section on the robust australopiths.

1. 27a.

   Section The robust australopithecines:  “From the skulls of these creatures, it is obvious that there was nothing human-like about them.” ↩

Line, Peter.  “Sediba:  New alleged hominid ignites debate, but is no missing link.”  Creation Ministries International.  Apr 13, 2010.  The first young-earth response to the 2010 description, by a Creation Ministries International writer on human origins.

1. 28a.

   Paragraph beginning "The above contrary opinions":  “The above contrary opinions may well be resolved if Australopithecus sediba is a small-brained specimen of the type evolutionists have often classified as Homo habilis.”  Line adds that Homo habilis is commonly regarded as an invalid taxon whose members belong in Australopithecus. ↩

Line, Peter.  “Developments in paleoanthropology 2.”  Journal of Creation 36(1):89–98.  2022.  A survey of recent hominin finds for a young-earth readership, including the 2021 lumbar vertebrae of MH2.

1. 29a.

   Page 93:  “the ape-like ones (small brain, shoulders and long arms suited for climbing, conical rib cage and weak heel) appear to indicate unambiguously that it was an apish primate.”  “Hence, if Australopithecus sediba walked upright it was likely not as a human”. ↩

2. 29b.

   Page 90, section Homo bodoensis and the muddle in the middle:  “Whether they are called Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, ‘archaic’ Homo sapiens, Homo bodoensis, or some other name, the fossil specimens assigned to these categories do not represent evolutionary ‘apemen’ stages between Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens.  Rather, they were fully human, that is, descendants of Adam and Eve, as also were the fossil specimens assigned to Homo erectus.  As such, they belonged to various subgroups of the same species, Homo sapiens, whose individuals were capable of interbreeding with one another.  The few differences were caused by factors such as human variation, genetic drift, as well as environmental influences.”  “For as long as the fossil specimens are interpreted using an incorrect model (evolution), ‘the muddle in the middle’ will remain in a confusing state.” ↩ ↩

Thomas, Brian.  “A New Evolutionary Link?  Australopithecus sediba Has All the Wrong Signs.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Apr 15, 2010.  An ICR news article published a week after the species was named.

1. 30a.

   Paragraph 1:  “But the remains of this extinct ape provide several solid clues that contradict any evolutionary relationship to man.” ↩

Thomas, Brian.  “Evolutionary "Game Changer" Doesn't Change Anything.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Nov 30, 2011.  An ICR essay on the 2011 Science papers.

1. 31a.

   Section closing paragraphs:  “It was not a transition toward man, but an extinct ape kind.” ↩ ↩

Thomas, Brian.  “Anthropologist Wows Scientists.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Jun 27, 2022.  An ICR report on a talk by the paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva.  Its footnote for the mixture claim is a 2014 New Scientist news story.  The article is reproduced on ICR's fossilization topic page.

1. 32a.

   “Now, enough have been published to reveal sediba as just a mixture of bones from different creatures.”  “Australopithecus sediba wasn't a real creature. It's just a mixture of human and ape bones that never belonged together.” ↩ ↩

O'Micks, Jean.  “Homo naledi Probably Not Part of the Human Holobaramin Based on Baraminic Re-Analysis Including Postcranial Evidence.”  Answers Research Journal 9:263–272.  2016.  O'Micks's re-analysis of Homo naledi with skeleton characters added.  It reversed his first paper and put naledi, with sediba, among the australopiths.

1. 33a.

   Page 271:  “Similarities between these two species in the structure of the upper limb, thorax, and feet suggest that they might be similar, if not the same species of australopithecine.” ↩ ↩ ↩

Line, Peter.  “Sorting 'early' Homo.”  Journal of Creation 27(1):13–15.  Mar 2013.  Line's second look at habilis, published in the journal and later on the web without page numbers.  Leaning on Bromage's 2008 reconstruction, it moves 1470 and 1813 to the australopiths and calls habilis a mixture made mostly of australopiths, reversing his 2005 view of 1470.

1. 34a.

   Section Faulty reconstruction of KNM-ER 1470:  “However, one reason why KNM-ER 1470 is almost certainly an australopithecine is that the original reconstruction appears to have been faulty.”  Section Where do Homo habilis specimens fit?:  “However, subsequent assessment indicates KNM-ER 1813 belongs with the australopithecines.”  Section Sinking Homo habilis into the australopithecines:  “is a composite species, consisting mostly of australopithecines, but with a few Homo erectus specimens also wrongly categorized.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

Line, Peter.  “New Dmanisi skull threatens to bring the house down.”  creation.com.  Oct 29, 2013.  Line's web response to the 2013 description of Dmanisi Skull 5.  It proposes that the small-brained Dmanisi people were humans with cretinism, and ranks normal human variation as the less likely explanation.

1. 35a.

   After the cave-collapse scenario:  “The above scenario is very speculative, and it may well be that the considerable morphological variation, as well as the extremely small brain sizes, evident in the Dmanisi Homo erectus population, were within normal limits of variation for robust humans, although I consider this option less likely.” ↩ ↩

Line, Peter.  “New Homo erectus crania associated with stone tools raise issues.”  Journal of Creation 34(2):55–61.  Aug 2020.  A creationist survey of 48 Homo erectus skulls that treats all of them, including the smallest from Dmanisi, as human, and concedes that disease cannot explain most of the small ones.

1. 36a.

   Page 57:  “the mean cranial capacity of 48 Homo erectus crania was calculated to be about 934 cc (range of 48 crania was 546 cc to 1260 cc)”.  Page 58:  “there was a huge natural variation in cranial capacity of these humans”. ↩ ↩

2. 36b.

   Pages 58, 59:  “The most logical conclusion appears to be that most Homo erectus specimens were not pathological and that there was a huge natural variation in cranial capacity of these humans ... For reasons unknown many members of this group had small brain size, and hence small cranial capacity.” ↩

Mitchell, Elizabeth.  “Hobbits of Flores Were an Archaic Human Variety, Studies Suggest.”  Answers in Genesis, News to Know.  Jul 15, 2016.  Answers in Genesis's response to the 2016 redating and the Mata Menge fossils, by a physician on its staff.  It accepts Baab's rebuttal of Down syndrome and reads Mata Menge as evidence of a population.

1. 37a.

   Section Island Dwarfism: Evolutionary Shrinkage?:  “The population bottleneck of the global Flood about 4,350 years ago reduced the world's human population to eight people—Noah and his family. … Thus we can readily understand that so-called separate species of humans such as the Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Denisovans, early modern humans were just as human as we are.” ↩ ↩

2. 37b.

   Section Hobbits Likely the Norm on Ancient Flores:  “Hobbit-like fossils newly discovered at a distant site on the island of Flores may soon totally tip the anthropological scale in favor of the view that the Flores hobbits were a unique variety of human, not a few diseased outliers among the island's population.” ↩

Lubenow, Marvin L.  “'Hobbits' Were Real!”  Answers in Genesis.  Sep 13, 2006.  A short web article by the author of Bones of Contention;  a second, "'Hobbits' Were True Humans!", followed on 14 February 2007.

1. 38a.

   Paragraph 7:  “Both of these alternate views are offered by evolutionists, and the controversy is heating up! However, both of these views are compatible with young-earth creationism.” ↩

Line, Peter.  “The Hobbit: Precious fossil or poisoned chalice?”  creation.com.  Jun 21, 2006.  Line's first treatment, published two months before Jacob et al.'s paper.  It leans to microcephaly on the strength of Henneberg's and Jacob's statements to the press and of Weber et al. 2005, whether in a modern human or in a Homo erectus.

1. 39a.

   Paragraph final:  “As arguments to the contrary accumulate, it is probably more likely that the LB1 skeleton, whilst still human and hence a descendant of Adam, is a reflection of post–Babel human pathological variation.” ↩ ↩

Line, Peter.  “Revisiting Homo floresiensis.”  Journal of Creation 36(3):82–91.  Dec 2022.  Line's most detailed treatment of the hobbit, in Creation Ministries International's journal.  It discusses the 2016 redating and the Mata Menge fossils and holds that the hobbits were humans, some of them cretins.

1. 40a.

   Section Discussion and conclusion:  “Consequently, if some Homo floresiensis individuals were cretins, their morphological features may still have differed. It is likely that only a relatively small percentage were cretins.” ↩ ↩

Thomas, Brian.  “New 'Species' Was Just a Tiny Human.”  Institute for Creation Research, Creation Science Update.  Dec 31, 2008.  The Institute for Creation Research's position in 2008, written after Falk 2007 and Baab and McNulty's three-dimensional study of the skull's shape.  The same author reversed it in 2020.

1. 41a.

   Paragraph 3:  “Now researchers have offered even more evidence that these were diminutive, not diseased, people.” ↩ ↩

O'Micks, J.  “Rebuttal to "Reply to O'Micks Concerning the Geology and Taphonomy of the Homo naledi Site" and "Identifying Humans in the Fossil Record: A Further Response to O'Micks".”  Answers Research Journal 10:63–70.  2017.  O'Micks's answer to McLain and to Wood.  Mirror:  Answersresearchjournal.org

1. 42a.

   Page 63:  “H. floresiensis might well be another example of a fossil ape, based on both cranial and post-cranial characteristics (similar to H. naledi), mistaken to be a diminutive archaic human. … Baraminic analyses of one cranial data set and two post-cranial data sets suggest that both H. naledi and H. floresiensis are not part of the human holobaramin, but are rather australopiths.” ↩

Cserhati, Matthew et al.  “What is Homo luzonensis? Ape or man?”  creation.com.  Oct 16, 2019.  Creation Ministries International's response to Détroit et al. 2019, updated 7 November 2019.  Cserhati is a bioinformatician, Line a neuroscientist who writes CMI's hominin articles, Tay a CMI speaker.

1. 43a.

   Section conclusion:  “None of the bones have features which resemble only australopithecines. From the scant evidence there is at this point no reason to think that H. luzonensis is not human. It could be that H. luzonensis is very similar to H. floresiensis and both are human, likely belonging to the Negrito population living in the Philippines.” ↩

Line, Peter.  “Making sense of Homo naledi.”  Creation 40(4):36–38.  2018.  A magazine summary of Line's position on Homo naledi:  post-Babel humans, some with cretinism.

1. 44a.

   “These were post-Fall descendants of Adam, perhaps erectus-like post-Babel humans … A number of them suffered from a developmental pathology, cretinism, as suggested by the region’s history of endemic iodine deficiency.” ↩ ↩

Mitchell, Elizabeth.  “Sima de los Huesos Reveals Surprising Genetic Connections.”  Answers in Genesis.  Dec 16, 2013.  The Answers in Genesis response to the 2014 Sima mitochondrial genome, written a year before the site was re-dated.  Mirror:  Archive.org

1. 45a.

   Section One Big Family:  “We find genetic evidence that people were related because they all descended from the 8 people that disembarked from Noah’s ark after the global Flood, about 4,350 years ago.  Denisovans and Neanderthals and the people of Sima de los Huesos (whether they are called Homo heidelbergensis or something else) were simply humans who lived in the post-Flood world and left their fossilized remains in Ice Age sediment.” ↩

Line, Peter.  “An overview of the Denisovan puzzle.”  Creation Ministries International.  May 28, 2019.  A 2019 overview by Peter Line, updated 28 June 2019, of the Denisovan fossils and DNA found up to that date.  Line argues that if the long ages are dropped, the Denisovan, Neanderthal and Sima de los Huesos remains could all belong to fully human populations that interbred.

1. 46a.

   “Although confusing, one can conclude from the studies described above that the Denisovans were interbreeding with modern humans and Neanderthals.  There is also strong evidence of Neanderthals interbreeding with modern humans.  Between 2 and 4% of the genomes of non-Africans are estimated to be Neanderthal.  Hence, by the biological species concept that makes them all part of the same species.” ↩

Lacey, Troy.  “Dragon Man, the Newest Human "Cousin"?”  Answers in Genesis.  Aug 14, 2021.  The Answers in Genesis response to the 2021 papers on the Harbin skull.  It calls the skull a post-Babel human and suggests it was Denisovan, which molecular studies confirmed in 2025.

1. 47a.

   Section Where Does Dragon Man Fit?:  “Dragon Man is a post-Babel human, perhaps of the Denisovan people group, or perhaps a result of intermarriage between post-Babel Denisovans and Neanderthals.  Or perhaps he is only distantly related to those groups.  In any case, he was just as human as you and me.”  An editor's note added below this passage reports that DNA from the skull's dental tartar, published in June 2025, shows it belongs to a Denisovan. ↩

Ham, Ken.  “Is "Dragon Man" What Our Denisovan Relatives Looked Like?”  Answers in Genesis.  Jun 30, 2025.  A short blog response to the 2025 Harbin molecular papers by the founder of Answers in Genesis.

1. 48a.

   Paragraph 10:  “They were human beings (ordinary people like us), made in God’s image, who lived after the dispersion at Babel in areas that were hit hard by the ice age”.  The last paragraph of the piece, which has no subheadings. ↩

Cuozzo, John W.  “Skull 1470—a new look.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 14(3):173–176.  1977.  An argument that 1470's ape-like nose and tooth sockets reflect damage after death, so that its owner may have looked like a modern man.

1. 49a.

   Page 173:  “Reasons are presented here for believing that the ape-like features may be due to environmental happenings to the skull after its owner's death. Thus the owner may well have looked very much like a present-day man.” ↩

Wise, Kurt P.  “The Flores Skeleton and Human Baraminology.”  Occasional Papers of the BSG 6:1–13.  Nov 2, 2005.  The one young-earth paper that gives the hobbit a place in a chronology and a mechanism other than disease or island selection.  Wise is a Harvard-trained palaeontologist and the leading young-earth theorist of post-Flood diversification.  Written eleven years before the Mata Menge fossils.

1. 50a.

   Page 1:  “The morphology, age, and stratrigraphic relations of the recently described Homo floresiensis skeleton suggests it might represent a distinct post-Babel human population with an extreme morphology. Combined with the morphologies and relative ages of other post-Babel humans (e.g. H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis), H. floresiensis suggests a high post-Flood intrabaraminic diversification rate decreasing to the present.”  "stratrigraphic" is the source's spelling. ↩

Wise, Kurt P.  “Paleontological Note on Homo naledi.”  Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B: Life Sciences 6:9–13.  2016.  The most careful young-earth reading of the 2015 taphonomy paper, by a Harvard-trained palaeontologist.  Written before any date existed.  Mirror:  Archive.org

1. 51a.

   Page 12:  “In the case of H. naledi, Berger et al. reports three CVs – a body mass CV of 9%, a lower first molar CV of 3.2% (n ≥7), and an upper first molar CV of 2% (n≥7).  This suggests that not only are the H. naledi specimens of the same species, they are from the same population of humans, and probably the same close family.” ↩

McLain, Matthew.  “Reply to O'Micks Concerning the Geology and Taphonomy of the Homo naledi Site.”  Answers Research Journal 10:55–56.  2017.  A young-earth palaeontologist answers O'Micks from the excavators' sedimentology and taphonomy.

1. 52a.

   Page 56:  “The best explanation for the H. naledi assemblage that takes into account all of the sedimentological and taphonomic data currently known is that these individuals were placed into this chamber intentionally by other H. naledi.  Intentional burial lends credence to the hypothesis that H. naledi is a human being.” ↩

Gunz, Philipp et al.  “Australopithecus afarensis endocasts suggest ape-like brain organization and prolonged brain growth.”  Science Advances 6(14):eaaz4729.  2020.  A CT study of eight A. afarensis braincases, partly by synchrotron, against a large sample of living apes.  It gives the brain volumes of Lucy, her species and 240 chimpanzees, and finds an ape-like brain organisation with prolonged growth.

1. 53a.

   Measured endocranial volumes.  A.L. 288-1 (Lucy):  mean 388 ml, range 365–417.  A.L. 822-1:  382 ml.  A.L. 333-45:  488 ml.  A.L. 444-2:  522 ml.  Adult A. afarensis average:  445 ml, SD 60 (standard deviation, a measure of spread), range 365–526.  DIK-1-1 (Selam), infant:  275 ml corrected, 237 ml unreconstructed.  Comparative sample:  Pan troglodytes adults, N = 240, mean 369 ml, SD 37.  Excluding the geologically younger A.L. 444-2 drops the adult afarensis average to 420 ml.  The ~1,350 ml modern human figure is a standard textbook average and is not from this paper. ↩ ↩

2. 53b.

   Section Results:  “The average adult EV of A. afarensis (445 ml; SD, 60 ml) is larger than in Pan troglodytes (369 ml; SD, 37 ml; N = 240).” ↩ ↩

Wood, Todd C.  “Taxon Sample Size in Hominin Baraminology: A Response to O'Micks.”  Answers Research Journal 9:369–372.  2016.  Wood's reply to O'Micks's postcranial re-analysis, on how taxon sampling affects the result. ↩

Mehlert, A. W.  “The rise and fall of skull KNM-ER 1470.”  CEN Technical Journal 13(2):96–100.  1999.  A history of the reconstructions of 1470 and of creationist views on it, concluding that the skull is a large-brained australopith.  It rests heavily on Timothy Bromage's 1992 work on the face.

1. 55a.

   Page 100:  “What is clear is that the later reconstructions of skull 1470, along with Bromage’s bone-scanning technique, reveal a craniofacial structure similar to gracile australopithecine, except for the larger brain size.” ↩

Berger, Lee R. et al.  “Australopithecus sediba:  A New Species of Homo-Like Australopith from South Africa.”  Science 328(5975):195–204.  Apr 9, 2010.  The paper that names the species, by the team that found it.  It describes the juvenile skeleton MH1 as the type specimen and the adult MH2 as the paratype, lists the skull and tooth characters that keep the species in Australopithecus and the hip features it shares with Homo, and proposes it as a candidate ancestor of Homo while noting the timing problem. ↩

1. 56a.

   Page 200, table 1:  Cranial capacity, species averages in cubic centimetres:  A. afarensis 415, A. africanus 442, A. sediba 420, H. habilis 631, H. rudolfensis 751, H. erectus 900. ↩ ↩ ↩

Kubo, Daisuke et al.  “Brain size of Homo floresiensis and its evolutionary implications.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280(1760):20130338.  Jun 7, 2013.  A high-resolution micro-CT measurement of LB1's endocranial volume, 426 cc, with about 17 per cent of the surface reconstructed, followed by brain-on-body scaling from two candidate ancestors using slopes fitted across twenty Holocene human populations.  The authors note that the slope is a within-human one extrapolated below the human range.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 57a.

   Page 5:  “we conclude that the original ECV of the LB1 cranium was 426 cc with only a limited degree of error, probably within ±3 cc.” ↩

Berger, Lee R. et al.  “Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa.”  eLife 4:e09560.  2015.  The type description of Homo naledi by the excavating team:  1,550 specimens from at least 15 individuals in the Dinaledi Chamber.  It lists which parts of the skeleton resemble early Homo, which resemble modern humans, and which resemble the australopiths.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 58a.

   Section Abstract:  “Representing at least 15 individuals with most skeletal elements repeated multiple times, this is the largest assemblage of a single species of hominins yet discovered in Africa.”  The count of 1,550 specimens and 737 partial or complete elements is in the paper's inventory. ↩ ↩

2. 58b.

   Section Description:  “H. naledi has a range of body mass similar to small-bodied modern human populations”.  Endocranial volumes of about 560 and 465 cc for the two composite crania;  body mass 39.7 to 55.8 kg from eight femoral subtrochanteric diameters;  stature about 144.5 to 147.8 cm from one tibia, a range the paper prints as "mm", an evident misprint.  The paper lists the cranial shape and teeth as resembling early Homo, the hand, wrist, foot and lower limb as human-like, the finger bones as more curved than any australopith's, and the shoulder, trunk, pelvis and upper femur as australopith-like, and notes that within Homo only the smallest H. habilis, one H. erectus and H. floresiensis overlap the brain volumes. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

Lordkipanidze, David et al.  “A Complete Skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the Evolutionary Biology of Early Homo.”  Science 342(6156):326–331.  Oct 18, 2013.  The description of Dmanisi Skull 5, the smallest-brained of five skulls from one site in Georgia.  The authors argue that the variation among the five is like that within one chimpanzee population, and so that the early African Homo species may be one variable lineage.

1. 59a.

   Page 330:  “morphological diversity in the African fossil Homo record around 1.8 Ma probably reflects variation between demes of a single evolving lineage, which is appropriately named H. erectus.” ↩

2. 59b.

   Page 327:  “The ECV of skull 5 (546 cm3) represents the smallest of the Dmanisi sample (skulls 1 to 4: 601 to 730 cm3), and it is at the lower end of variation of the H. habilis hypodigm [509 to 687 cm3 (16, 17)].” ↩ ↩

3. 59c.

   Page 327:  “Combining ECV and body mass data, the encephalization quotient (EQ) of the skull 5 individual is estimated as ~2.4, which is within the range of variation for Australopithecus.” ↩

Morwood, Michael J. et al.  “Further evidence for small-bodied hominins from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia.”  Nature 437(7061):1012–1017.  Oct 13, 2005.  The second season's finds:  LB1's right humerus and ulna, a second adult mandible (LB6/1), a very small adult tibia (LB8), and scattered bones of at least nine individuals.  Its claims of a 12,000-year terminus and of fire use were later withdrawn or unsupported.  Morwood led the Liang Bua project until his death in 2013.

1. 60a.

   Page 1016:  “For example, the humerofemoral index ((humerus length × 100)/femur length) of 85.4 is outside the range of variation for H. sapiens, but is the same as AL 288-1 A. afarensis, and midway between the indices for apes and humans.” ↩ ↩

2. 60b.

   Page 1016:  “However, although tooth size and facial morphology dictate inclusion of the species in the genus Homo, the genealogy of H. floresiensis remains uncertain. Similarities in stature and body proportions with Australopithecus, for example, may reflect phylogeny or secondary evolutionary convergence. Either way, H. floresiensis is not just an allometrically scaled-down version of H. erectus.” ↩

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program.  Human Origins species pages.  2026.  Retrieved Aug 3, 2026.  The Smithsonian's Human Origins species pages, a museum database that summarises the fossils of each species.  It is a secondary source, used here only for specimen counts.

1. 61a.

   Section Australopithecus afarensis species page:  “paleoanthropologists have uncovered remains from more than 300 individuals”.  The page says these remains span about 3.85 to 2.95 million years on the mainstream scale.  Sites named: Hadar, Dikika, Laetoli, and additionally Woranso-Mille, Maka, Fejej, Belohdelie and Koobi Fora. ↩

2. 61b.

   Section Ardipithecus ramidus species page:  “Over 100 specimens of Ardipithecus ramidus have been recovered in Ethiopia.”  ARA-VP-6/500 is a partial skeleton of a female including skull, hands, feet and pelvis. ↩

Wood, Bernard, and Mark Collard.  “The Human Genus.”  Science 284(5411):65–71.  1999.  The most-cited argument for removing habilis and rudolfensis from Homo.  It defines a genus by shared ancestry and a shared way of life, then scores each fossil species on body size, body shape, locomotion, teeth and jaws, growth and relative brain size.  Mirror:  Profmarkcollard.com

1. 62a.

   Page 66:  “The Cerebral Rubicon is problematic because absolute cranial capacity is of questionable biological significance”.  “We suggest, therefore, that a genus should be defined as a species, or monophylum, whose members occupy a single adaptive zone.” ↩

2. 62b.

   Page 68:  “If OH 62 and KNM-ER 3735 (2, 9) are properly attributed to H. habilis, then that species had body proportions similar to those of the australopiths”.  “Together these data suggest that H. habilis was capable of both terrestrial bipedalism and efficient arboreal activity.” ↩

3. 62c.

   Page 70:  “we recommend that, for the time being, both H. habilis and H. rudolfensis should be transferred to the genus Australopithecus.”  “The transfer will almost certainly make Australopithecus paraphyletic, and the genus will subsume an impressive range of cranial morphology”. ↩

Murdock, Matthew.  “These apes were made for walking:  the pelves of Australopithecus afarensis and Australopithecus africanus.”  Journal of Creation 20(2):104–112.  2006.  A young-earth paper on the australopith pelvis, arguing that the australopiths were upright-walking apes whose descendants lost that ability.  In passing it counts habilis and erectus among the apes.

1. 63a.

   Page 109:  “It seems as if apes in the past (australopithecines, Homo habilis and Homo erectus) were able to walk more upright than apes are able to do today.” ↩

Leakey, L. S. B. et al.  “A New Species of the Genus Homo from Olduvai Gorge.”  Nature 202(4927):7–9.  Apr 4, 1964.  The paper that named Homo habilis, with OH 7 as its type and OH 4, 6, 8, 13 and 16 as paratypes.  To fit the fossils into Homo it rewrote the definition of the genus, replacing a single brain-size cut-off with a range starting at about 600 cc.  It gives no dates.  Mirror:  Archive.org

1. 64a.

   Page 7:  “Until now, the definition of Homo has usually centred about a ‘cerebral Rubicon’ variably set at 700 c.c. (Weidenreich), 750 c.c. (Keith) and 800 c.c. (Vallois).” ↩

Collard, Mark, and Bernard Wood.  “Defining the Genus Homo.”  Handbook of Paleoanthropology, 2107–2144.  Springer.  2nd edition.  Edited by Winfried Henke and Ian Tattersall.  2015.  Collard and Wood's own update of their 1999 review, weighing six newer family-tree studies.  It keeps the 1999 conclusion while conceding that the family-tree evidence on habilis and rudolfensis is weak either way.  Mirror:  Profmarkcollard.com

1. 65a.

   Page 2108:  “We find that, on balance, the available evidence still supports their suggestion that Homo should be reconfigured such that it includes H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens but excludes H. habilis and H. rudolfensis.”  Page 2129:  “but only weak support for the hypothesis that H. habilis and H. rudolfensis are more closely related to H. sapiens than to the types species of any other genus.” ↩

Kimbel, William H., and Brian Villmoare.  “From Australopithecus to Homo:  the transition that wasn't.”  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371:20150248.  2016.  An essay by the leaders of the Ledi-Geraru team arguing that a genus should be defined by shared ancestry alone, so that habilis stays in Homo even though its anatomy is close to the australopiths.  It also warns how weak the links between early Homo skulls and skeletons are.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 66a.

   Section 1. Introduction:  “Biologists nearly universally agree that monophyly is the one essential criterion for grouping species in a genus.”  Section 2. The changing idea of early Homo:  “Our taxonomy first and foremost needs to reflect the underlying branching pattern”. ↩ ↩

Wood, Bernard.  “Human evolution:  Fifty years after Homo habilis.”  Nature 508:31–33.  2014.  A retrospective on the fiftieth anniversary of the naming of habilis, by one of the authors of the 1999 proposal to remove it from Homo.

1. 67a.

   Page 32:  “So, if H. habilis is added to Homo, the genus has an incoherent mishmash of features. Others disagree, but I think you have to cherry-pick the data to come to any other conclusion. My sense is that handy man should belong to its own genus, neither australopith nor human.”  A reference number after "data" is omitted. ↩ ↩

Tattersall, Ian, and Jeffrey H. Schwartz.  Extinct Humans.  Westview Press, Boulder.  2001.  A popular account of the human fossil record by two anthropologists who favour recognising many species, written for general readers.

1. 68a.

   Page 111:  “effectively confirmed the status of H. habilis as an all-embracing “wastebasket” species into which a whole heterogeneous variety of fossils could be conveniently swept.” ↩

Leakey, Richard, and Roger Lewin.  Origins Reconsidered:  In Search of What Makes Us Human.  Abacus, London.  1993.  Richard Leakey's popular account of human origins, written with Roger Lewin and first published in 1992.  The page given is that of the 1993 paperback.

1. 69a.

   Page 112:  “Of the several dozen specimens that have been said at one time or another to belong in this species, at least half probably don't. But there is no consensus as to which 50 percent should be excluded.” ↩

Delson, Eric, and Chris Stringer.  “The naming of Homo bodoensis by Roksandic and colleagues does not resolve issues surrounding Middle Pleistocene human evolution.”  Evolutionary Anthropology 31(5):233–236.  2022.  The first published rejection of Homo bodoensis, by two senior workers who agree with much of the biology and reject the name on the rules of zoological nomenclature.  Stringer is the author of the standard 2012 paper on Homo heidelbergensis.

1. 70a.

   Page 234:  “About the same time, many researchers took up the idea of “archaic H. sapiens” as a “taxon” for almost all post‐erectus specimens without clear subdivision, so that (sub)specific nomina such as rhodesiensis were rarely mentioned in the 1980s and 1990s … During the 2000s, the “archaic H. sapiens” concept was rejected in favor of recognizing several species or subspecies of Homo younger than 1 Ma.”  At the first omission the sentence continues "whereas Stringer and Rightmire included H. rhodesiensis in their conception of H. heidelbergensis".  The second rejection in print is Sarmiento and Pickford's, in the same issue. ↩

2. 70b.

   Page 233, section Abstract:  “We reject H. bodoensis as a junior synonym, with no value from its inception.” ↩

Roksandic, Mirjana et al.  “Resolving the "muddle in the middle":  The case for Homo bodoensis sp. nov.”  Evolutionary Anthropology 31(1):20–29.  2022.  The naming proposal, published online in October 2021.  It asks that Homo heidelbergensis and Homo rhodesiensis be dropped and a new species founded on the Bodo cranium;  no new fossil or new analysis is reported.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 71a.

   Page 26, section Discussion and conclusions:  “While not a true species in the strict biological sense (since there is strong and growing evidence of migrations as well as gene flow between these diverged groups) this newly defined taxon cuts through the obfuscating and inconsistent use of improperly named and defined Middle Pleistocene hominins in Europe and Africa”. ↩

Morley, Mike W. et al.  “Initial micromorphological results from Liang Bua, Flores (Indonesia): Site formation processes and hominin activities at the type locality of Homo floresiensis.”  Journal of Archaeological Science 77:125–142.  Jan 2017.  Thin-section study of the cave sediments, which found hearths and dated them by radiocarbon on their own charcoal, and then reviewed the fire evidence claimed in 2005.  Morley is a geoarchaeologist, then at the University of Wollongong.  Sutikna, Jatmiko, Saptomo, Wasisto and Roberts were also authors of the 2005 paper.  Manuscript pages 28 and 29 below are pages of the authors' accepted manuscript, numbered 1 to 41;  the journal pagination is 125–142.  Mirror:  Ro.uow.edu.au

1. 72a.

   Page 125:  “Importantly, we identify anthropogenic signs of fire-use at the site between 41 and 24 thousand years ago, most likely related to the presence of modern humans.” ↩

2. 72b.

   Section Combustion features and fire-use, manuscript page 28:  “The 'charred bones' initially reported by Morwood et al. (2004, 2005) within the H. floresiensis-bearing deposits are clearly the result of manganese staining, and no definitive evidence of burnt faunal remains has been recovered during subsequent excavations of these deposits. Similarly, analyses of the "clusters of reddened and fire-cracked rocks" (Morwood et al., 2005:1012) from within the H. floresiensis-bearing sediments have demonstrated that these stones were not exposed to any significant heat source (Roberts et al., 2009). Furthermore, the most extensive study so far of the Liang Bua stone artefact assemblages (Moore et al., 2009) found a marked discrepancy in terms of artefact exposure to fire, with negligible evidence (<1%) in assemblages associated with H. floresiensis remains, versus almost 18% of stone artefacts of Holocene age attributed to modern humans.” ↩