Some hominid evolution items

Two items worth reading:

Mailund notes that the 2006 claim of complex speciation, involving gene exchange for some time after the chimp and hominid lineages split, has been argued against on the grounds that high rates of sperm production in humans and chimps could generate the effect.

Pleiotropy discusses the Hobbit’s phylogeny, noting that the cladistics won’t determine whether it was a distinct species, because just putting the specimens into the data matrix presumes that they are:

The fishy part is that in order to construct cladograms like the ones above, the authors assumed that H. floresiensis and H. sapiens are different species. Once that is done, no other conclusion can be reached.