Recently developed phylogeographic analyses that incorporate genealogical relationships of alleles offer the exciting prospect of disentangling historical from contemporary events. However, the relative advantages and shortfalls of this approach remain to be studied. We compared the nested cladistic method to the more traditional analysis of variance approach in a study of intraspecific genetic...

Intricately decorated Lapita pottery (3100-2700 BP) was made and deposited by the prehistoric colonizers of Pacific islands, east of the main Solomon's chain. For decades, analyses of this pottery have focused on the ancestor-descendant relationships of populations and the relative degree of interaction across the region to explain similarities in Lapita decoration. Cladistic analyses, increasi...

Cladistic character matrices are routinely repurposed in analyses of morphological disparity. Unfortunately, the sampling taxa and characters within such datasets reflects their intended application (to resolve phylogeny, rather than distinguish between phenotypes) resulting tree shapes that often misrepresent broader taxonomic diversity. Here we use shape as a proxy to explore how can affect p...