A personal perspective of splitting and lumping in anthropology

Sep 3rd, By Bryan Cross Category:

From a paleontological perspective, I would say it leads to excessive splitting. Generally unavoidable, but none-the- less very excessive. As far as I am concerned, yes. The only down-side of course, is the missing soft-tissue data in the paleontological record. Some of the soft-tissue data can be approximated from muscle-scar insertions on the bones, pelvic width, cranial capacity, etc.

And the soft tissue data one gets from paleontology is very crude compared to the abundance of data taken from modern zoological specimens. Because of the extremely limited amount of information that we can gleen from fossil animals, rigid classification rules are extremely important.

For instance, the probability of a fossil taxon being assigned as a new species when in reality, it should be assigned to a new genus if we could study the soft tissues of the animal is very high in paleontology.

This is not possible with extinct species. There is a distinct possibility that the early Homo species were extremely close genetically sort of a like an early African version of the multiregional hypothesis. Finding more Homo specimens will clear up these little ambiguities.

My personal interest lies in these questions: How much branching is there in the genus Homo?

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Did early or even late speciation occur within our genus, or is everthing we are finding suggesting a single straight-line of Homo evolution? And, most importantly, is the time-resolution and precision within the fossil record high enough to answer these questions?

• Lumper or Splitter?
• Lumpers and splitters - Wikipedia
• splitting and lumping | Tim Kastelle

I have a hunch that it is.A similar lumping has occurred within the triceratops lineage. And paleoanthropologists have long argued about whether 13,year-old, three-foot tall hominid bones from Indonesia are those of diseased modern humans or a unique lineage with short stature.

Lumping or splitting in the fossil record November As new Homo and other fossils are discovered and analyzed, lumpers and splitters will continue to refine our understanding of the history of life on Earth.

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Primary literature: Horner, J. R., and Goodwin, M. B. (). Lumping and splitting refers to a well known problem in any discipline which has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper/splitter problem occurs when there is the need to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature, biological paleo-species and so on.

Sproul says (6’28”) “the One who was pure was pure no more.” That implies that for Sproul, Christ became impure, with all the impurity that was incurred by each and every sin that all the elect ever committed and will commit.

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Lumping and splitting In the 11 December issue of Science, Jim Endersby writes about the "lumpers" and "splitters" among early 19th-century biologists.

It was a time when naturalists spread out across the globe collecting and classifying plants and animals. Ooh, nice. I’ll have to listen to it this evening. Together, the recent papers on the genetics of the Corded Ware/Battle Ax people make it highly likely that the non-Anatolian branch of IE expanded with the brown-eyed, lactose-tolerant hordes of the Yamnaya culture.