Traditional Morphometrics and Biological Distance

Pietrusewsky, Michael

doi:10.1002/9781119151647.ch17

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 120 publications

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“…This study presents a hitherto unexplored craniometric dataset. This dataset, included as an online supplement, will be useful to conduct comparative craniometric studies on global populations (Howells, 1973;Pietrusewsky, 2019). Culturally or biologically affiliated descendants are increasingly showing an interest in scientific studies of their ancestors represented in skeletal collections (Turnbull, 2016;Roberts et al, 2018;Wright et al, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sarasins’ Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania

Kulatilake

2020

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Swiss naturalists Paul and Fritz Sarasin visited Sri Lanka on five occasions. Their later visits were focused on anthropological research on the Indigenous Wannila Atto ('Vedda') people and exploration of prehistoric settlements in Sri Lanka. Among the Sarasins' anthropological and archaeological collections are skeletal material of several ethnic groups of Sri Lanka belonging to the 19th and early 20th centuries. This collection is curated at the Natural History Museum of Basel, Switzerland. The ethnolinguistic groups represented in the Sarasins' collection include the 'Vedda,' Tamil, and Sinhala people of Sri Lanka, and it constitutes the largest 'Vedda' cranial collection housed at a single institution. The objective of this paper is to compare cranial variation of the Indigenous 'Vedda' and other Sri Lankan ethnic groups using this important dataset, while publishing the raw craniometric data for further studies. Observations on the dentition show that the Tamil and Sinhala individuals had high incidences of caries and dental abscesses that are typically associated with agriculturalists and that cribra orbitalia associated with iron deficiency was relatively common among all three ethnic groups. Betel quid chewing for recreational and cultural purposes, a practice that is widespread even today, had left dark stains on the teeth of many individuals of all groups in the sample. Multivariate statistical analyses on the craniometric data show that there is significant overlap among the three ethnic groups in terms of cranial shape. These findings underscore the importance of considering the 'Vedda,' Tamil, and Sinhala groups from Sri Lanka as closely related, due to gene flow over millennia.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sarasins’ Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania

Kulatilake

2020

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“…A canonical variates analysis (CVA: a linear combination of predictor variables that summarize among-population variation) was conducted using the newly calculated shape variables [ 82 ]. Among-group differentiation was measured using Mahalanobis squared distances, which is a similarity measure and a function of group means and the pooled variance–covariance matrix [ 82 ]. A hierarchical (or agglomerative) cluster analysis using average linkage was conducted on the Mahalanobis squared distances to examine group similarity [ 70 ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Midfacial Morphology and Neandertal–Modern Human Interbreeding

Churchill

Keys

Ross

2022

Biology

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Ancient DNA from, Neandertal and modern human fossils, and comparative morphological analyses of them, reveal a complex history of interbreeding between these lineages and the introgression of Neandertal genes into modern human genomes. Despite substantial increases in our knowledge of these events, the timing and geographic location of hybridization events remain unclear. Six measures of facial size and shape, from regional samples of Neandertals and early modern humans, were used in a multivariate exploratory analysis to try to identify regions in which early modern human facial morphology was more similar to that of Neandertals, which might thus represent regions of greater introgression of Neandertal genes. The results of canonical variates analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis suggest important affinities in facial morphology between both Middle and Upper Paleolithic early modern humans of the Near East with Neandertals, highlighting the importance of this region for interbreeding between the two lineages.

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“…Average linkage hierarchical (or agglomerative) clustering was conducted using the generalized distance matrix to examine group similarity [33,34]. The process begins with each population sample in a single cluster, then in each successive iteration, it merges the closest pair of clusters until all the data is in one cluster.…”

Section: Hierarchical Clusteringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ancestry Studies in Forensic Anthropology: Back on the Frontier of Racism

Ross

Williams

2021

Biology

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One of the parameters forensic anthropologists have traditionally estimated is ancestry, which is used in the United States as a proxy for social race. Its use is controversial because the biological race concept was debunked by scientists decades ago. However, many forensic anthropologists contend, in part, that because social race categories used by law enforcement can be predicted by cranial variation, ancestry remains a necessary parameter for estimation. Here, we use content analysis of the Journal of Forensic Sciences for the period 2009–2019 to demonstrate the use of various nomenclature and resultant confusion in ancestry estimation studies, and as a mechanism to discuss how forensic anthropologists have eschewed a human variation approach to studying human morphological differences in favor of a simplistic and debunked typological one. Further, we employ modern geometric morphometric and spatial analysis methods on craniofacial coordinate anatomical landmarks from several Latin American samples to test the validity of applying the antiquated tri-continental approach to ancestry (i.e., African, Asian, European). Our results indicate groups are not patterned by the ancestry trifecta. These findings illustrate the benefit and necessity of embracing studies that employ population structure models to better understand human variation and the historical factors that have influenced it.

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Traditional Morphometrics and Biological Distance

Cited by 7 publications

References 120 publications

The Sarasins’ Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania

The Sarasins’ Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania

Midfacial Morphology and Neandertal–Modern Human Interbreeding

Ancestry Studies in Forensic Anthropology: Back on the Frontier of Racism

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