Publication co-authored by two Bryn Mawr college faculty at the American Journal of Biological Anthropology

Raskin, L. Y., M. Šešelj, B. D. Bitarello, S. Stroustrup, J. K. Li, and J. Huelsenbeck. 2026. “Principal Components Analysis Fails to Recover Phylogenetic Structure in Hominins.” American Journal of Biological Anthropology190, no. 3: e70306. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.70306. Significance: Paleoanthropologists often use geometric morphometrics and principal components analysis (PCA) to interpret shape variation within the hominin fossil record. It is common practice to interpret proximity in principal components (PC) space among taxa as indicative of not just morphological but also phylogenetic affinity. This interpretation, however, had not been directly evaluated for hominins. This publication addresses this gap. Through extensive simulations informed by real hominin data, the authors show the issues with this approach and conclude that phylogenetic interpretations of the hominin fossil record based on proximity in PC space are inherently flawed and likely to be erroneous. They argue that claims in the hominin systematics literature based on PCA, whether implied or explicit, should therefore be reevaluated using phylogenetically informed alternatives. This work is likely to have immediate implications for paleoanthropology, where this inappropriate practice is still common.