A new zooarchaeological application for geometric morphometric methods: Distinguishing Ovis aries morphotypes to address connectivity and mobility of prehistoric Central Asian pastoralists

High mitochondrial diversity of domesticated goats persisted among Bronze and Iron Age pastoralists in the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor

“…This finding provides an important reconfiguration in how traditional cultural interaction spheres of the Eurasian steppe zone are defined, suggesting that central Kazakhstan served as an arena of interaction between both north and south regions but did not function as a corridor for goat gene flow connecting the north and south together. This finding corresponds to recent research on regional variance in domesticated sheep astragali morphology using geometric morphometrics, showing that localized populations likely were genetically isolated from one another [106]. However, the presence of C and D goat haplotypes at Taldysai suggests repeated exchange events with southern Central Asia and the IAMC, but these lineages likely did not pass along to NES sites.…”

Close management of sheep in ancient Central Asia: evidence for foddering, transhumance, and extended lambing seasons during the Bronze and Iron Ages

“…Further, geometric morphometric data suggest that sheep were constrained to their respective environments (Haruda et al 2019). Variation in the morphology of sheep astragali reflects that they inhabited localized topographies and were discontinuous populations (Haruda et al 2019). These findings support our conclusion that sheep were not moved long distances but were foddered at low levels during the winter with C 4 or 13 C-enriched C 3 , fodder Table 2.…”

“…Furthermore, the highest peaks are only 800 masl, and the nearest high-altitude mountains are over 500 km away. Further, geometric morphometric data suggest that sheep were constrained to their respective environments (Haruda et al 2019). Variation in the morphology of sheep astragali reflects that they inhabited localized topographies and were discontinuous populations (Haruda et al 2019).…”

Identifying early stages of reindeer domestication in the archaeological record: a 3D morphological investigation on forelimb bones of modern populations from Fennoscandia

“…Geometric morphometrics (GMM) is a quantitative approach which allows the comparison of bone shapes and the visualization of significant morphological changes between groups of specimens while retaining the element of shape information related to size. In recent years, this methodology has been particularly developed to explore domestication and variability between populations, to study both the morphological variations of cranial and dental elements (Cucchi et al 2011 , 2017 , 2019 ; Evin et al 2013 , 2015 , 2017 ; Owen et al 2014 ; Drake et al 2015 ; Bopp-Ito et al 2018 ; Duval et al 2018 ) as well as those of postcranial elements (Bignon et al 2005 ; Curran 2012 ; Barr 2014 ; Hanot et al 2017 , 2018 ; Haruda 2017 ; Haruda et al 2019 ; Pöllath et al 2019 ; Harbers et al 2020 ). Thus, we applied a three-dimensional GMM approach to the computed tomography (CT) images of forelimb bones.…”