[a] Molecular evidence indicates that Paenungulata (or at least its extant members) is part of the cohort Afrotheria, an ancient assemblage of mainly African mammals of great diversity.

The other members of this cohort are the orders Afrosoricida (tenrecs and golden moles), Macroscelidea (elephant shrews) and Tubulidentata (aardvarks).

[3] In 1945, George Gaylord Simpson used traditional taxonomic techniques to group these spectacularly diverse mammals in the superorder he named Paenungulata ("almost ungulates"), but there were many loose threads in unravelling their genealogy.

When genetic techniques were developed for inspecting amino acid differences among haemoglobin sequences the most parsimonious cladograms depicted Simpson's Paenungulata as an authentic clade and as one of the first groups to diversify from the basal placental mammals (Eutheria).

[4] However, a 2014 cladistic analysis placed anthracobunids and desmostylians, two major extinct groups that have been considered to be non-African afrotheres, close to each other within Perissodactyla.