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Morphometrics, the field of biological shape analysis, has undergone major change in recent years. Most of this change has been due to the development and adoption of methods to analyze the Cartesian coordinates of anatomical landmarks. These geometric morphometric (GM) methods focus on the retention of geometric information throughout a study and provide efficient, statistically powerful analyses that can readily relate abstract, multivariate results to the physical structure of the original specimens. Physical anthropology has played a central role in both the development and the early adoption of these methods, just as it has done in the realm of general statistics, where it has served as a major motivating and contributing force behind much innovation. This review surveys the current state of GM, the role of anthropologists in its development, recent applications of GM in physical anthropology, and GM-based methods newly introduced to, or by, anthropology, which are likely to impact future research.

The farming way of life originated in the Near East some 11,000 years ago and had reached most of the European continent 5000 years later. However, the impact of the agricultural revolution on demography and patterns of genomic variation in Europe remains unknown. We obtained 249 million base pairs of genomic DNA from ~5000-year-old remains of three hunter-gatherers and one farmer excavated in Scandinavia and find that the farmer is genetically most similar to extant southern Europeans, contrasting sharply to the hunter-gatherers, whose distinct genetic signature is most similar to that of extant northern Europeans. Our results suggest that migration from southern Europe catalyzed the spread of agriculture and that admixture in the wake of this expansion eventually shaped the genomic landscape of modern-day Europe.

The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation—a format we maintain here because, among other things, it permits a welcome level of candor and simplicity. In this forum we present two questions (written by Alberti and Witmore, along with the concluding comments) and the responses of five of the Theoretical Archaeology Group session participants. The first question asks why we think an ontological approach is important to our respective fields; the second, building upon the first set of responses, asks authors to consider the difference that pluralizing ontology might make and whether such a move is desirable given the aims of archaeology and anthropology. While several angles on ontology come through in the conversation, all share an interest in more immanent understandings that arise within specific situations and that are perhaps best described as thoroughly entangled rather than transcendent and/or oppositional in any straightforward sense.

The life history of Home sapiens is characterized by a lengthy period of juvenile dependence that requires extensive allocare, short interbirth intervals with concomitantly high fertility rates, and a life span much longer than that of other extant great apes. Although recognized as species-defining, the traits that make up human life history are also notable for their extensive within- and between-population variation, which appears to trace largely to phenotypic and developmental plasticity. In this review, we first discuss the adaptive origins of plasticity in life history strategy and its influence on traits such as growth rate, maturational tempo, reproductive scheduling, and life span in modern human populations. Second, we consider the likely contributions of this plasticity to evolutionary diversification and speciation within genus Home. Contrary to traditional assumptions that plasticity slows the pace of genetic adaptation, current empirical work and theory point to the potential for plasticity-induced phenotypes to \"lead the way\" and accelerate subsequent genetic adaptation. Building from this work, we propose a \"phenotype-first\" model of the evolution of human life history in which novel phenotypes were first generated by behaviorally or environmentally driven plasticity and were later gradually stabilized into species-defining traits through genetic accommodation. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Diet changes are considered key events in human evolution. Most studies of early hominin diets focused on tooth size, shape, and craniomandibular morphology, as well as stone tools and butchered animal bones. However, in recent years, dental microwear and stable isotope analyses have hinted at unexpected diversity and complexity in early hominin diets. Some traditional ideas have held; others, such as an increasing reliance on hard-object feeding and a dichotomy between Australopithecus and Paranthropus, have been challenged. The first known evidence of C₄ plant (tropical grasses and sedges) and hard-object (e.g., seeds and nuts) consumption dates to millions of years after the appearance of the earliest probable hominins, and there are no consistent trends in diet change among these species through time.

The past 200,000 years of human cultural evolution have witnessed the persistent establishment of behaviors involving innovation, planning depth, and abstract and symbolic thought, or what has been called “behavioral modernity.” Demographic models based on increased human population density from the late Pleistocene onward have been increasingly invoked to understand the emergence of behavioral modernity. However, high levels of social tolerance, as seen among living humans, are a necessary prerequisite to life at higher population densities and to the kinds of cooperative cultural behaviors essential to these demographic models. Here we provide data on craniofacial feminization (reduction in average brow ridge projection and shortening of the upper facial skeleton) inHomo sapiensfrom the Middle Pleistocene to recent times. We argue that temporal changes in human craniofacial morphology reflect reductions in average androgen reactivity (lower levels of adult circulating testosterone or reduced androgen receptor densities), which in turn reflect the evolution of enhanced social tolerance since the Middle Pleistocene.

The literature on the archaeology of emotion and affect is mostly quite recent and is not extensive. This review considers the main lines of approach taken so far and explores how different understandings of what constitutes an emotion underlie the work of archaeologists in this area. A distinction is made between past emotion as a subject of study and examination of the emotional subjectivity of the archaeologist as a method. The potential contribution of archaeology to emotion studies in the future includes bringing a sense of contextual historicity to the discussion and developing our knowledge of how material things and places are involved in shaping and expressing emotion. Inspired by some historians of emotion, a focus on shared emotional meanings, values, and codes seems a more productive direction than the exploration of idiosyncratic personal emotional experience.

Anthropologists have adopted methods from population genetics to study modes of cultural transmission in time-transgressive cultural data sets. However, it remains unclear to what extent methods originally developed to assess neutrality in genes sampled from a population at a single point in time are applicable to cultural variants sampled from assemblages. This report applies a suite of previously published methods to assemblages formed under unbiased cultural transmission. The results show that, even under the controlled conditions afforded by computer simulation, all but one method (the variants frequency approach) fail to identify unbiased cultural transmission in samples collected from moderately to severely time-averaged assemblages. While it is encouraging that the method that is best at identifying unbiased cultural transmission in simulated time-averaged data also is relatively robust to relative sample size, additional work is needed to determine whether even the variants frequency approach is powerful enough to identify “weakly” biased forms of cultural transmission in real-world assemblages.

The \"expensive brain\" framework proposes that the costs of an increase in brain size can be met by any combination of increasing the total energy turnover or reducing energy allocation to other expensive functions, such as maintenance (digestion), locomotion, or production (growth and reproduction). Here, we explore its implications for human evolution. Using both comparative data on extant mammals and life-table simulations from wild extant apes, we show that primates with a hominoid lifestyle face a gray ceiling that limits their brain size, with larger values leading to demographic nonviability. We argue that cooperative care provides the most plausible exaptation for the increase in brain size in the Homo lineage. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Models for the origin of the genus Homo propose that increased quality of diet led to changes in ranging ecology and selection for greater locomotor economy, speed, and endurance. Here, I examine the fossil evidence for postcranial change in early Homo and draw on comparative data from living mammals to assess whether increased diet quality has led to selection for improved locomotor performance in other lineages. Body mass estimates indicate early Homo, both males and females, were approximately 33% larger than australopiths, consistent with archeological evidence indicating an ecological change with the origins of our genus. However, many of the postcranial features thought to be derived in Homo, including longer hind limbs, are present in Australopithecus, challenging the hypothesis that early Homo is marked by significant change in walking and running performance. Analysis of energy budgets across mammals suggests that the larger body mass and increased diet quality in early Homo may reflect an increase in the hominin energy budget. Expanding the energy budget would enable greater investment in reproduction without decreasing energy available for larger brains or increased activity. Food sharing and increased adiposity, which decrease variance in food energy availability, may have been integral to this metabolic strategy.