Date of Award

5-8-2024

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Author's Department

Anthropology

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Type

Dissertation

Abstract

Prior research has shown that morphological distances between modern human populations calculated using the temporal, parietal, and frontal bones are significantly correlated with genetic distances, presumably due to genetic drift. An implication is that temporal, parietal, and frontal morphology may provide insights about population history and relationships in fossil hominins. This research tests the hypothesis that morphological distances between paleodemes of Homo erectus are correlated with geographic and/or temporal distances under the assumption that the latter are proxies for genetic distance. Following this, the implications of morphological distances among H. erectus paleodemes are assessed. Morphological distance matrices were computed for H. erectus using the R-matrix method. The number of PC scores required to explain at least 95% of the overall morphometric variance, for each bone respectively, were used as shape variables to calculate cranial vault morphological relationship matrices using phenotypic distances. This morphological matrix construction was conducted in RMET 5.0. The geographic distance matrices were calculated by measuring the distance between each paleodeme’s geographic center, measuring the shortest distance between centroids following an overland route. Chronological distance matrices were calculated using the mean age of the specimens within sites within a paleodeme. Off-diagonal matrix values from the morphological distance matrices and the geographic and temporal distance matrices, respectively, were compared using Mantel tests and Multiple Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedure (MR-QAP). Results indicate that in H. erectus there is a meaningful but modest correlation between temporal bone morphological distance and geographic distance, but this was not observed in the frontal or parietal bone. Cluster analysis as well as phylogenetic morphometric analysis based on temporal bone morphology implies that the dispersal of H. erectus to Indonesia and the subsequent relative isolation of that population may have been important aspects of population history in that species. Ultimately, however, distance-based methods alone are not likely to provide a full explication of population-level relationships in H. erectus.

Language

English (en)

Chair and Committee

David Strait

Download

Share

COinS