CRANIOFACIAL EVIDENCE AND THE NEW WORLD SETTLEMENT: USING EVO-DEVO CONCEPTS TO ENHANCE THE PHYLOGENETIC SIGNAL OF SKULL SHAPE DATA

DE AZEVEDO, SOLEDAD; ROLANDO GONZALEZ-JOSÉ

Burgos

Congreso; XVII World UISPP Congress; 2014

Union International de Sciences Préhistoriques e Protohistoriques

Skull size and shape data has been widely used to infer past and modern within and among group affinities. However, we are far from an extensive knowledge about the causation and underlying factors determining the patterns of skull variation and covariation. Its relevance for reconstructing dispersal of anatomically modern humans and among-population diversification processes relates to the fact that phylogenetic signals, even when massive evidence indicates their presence, are often blurred due to the fact that the vertebrate skull is a complex phenotype where morphological integration and modularity coexist and simultaneously act as covariance generators and structuring processes. In this context, we applied the Factor Model (Mitteroecker and Bookstein 2007), Geometric Morphometric techniques and basic and partial Mantel tests to analyze the integrated and modular shape spaces on Early and Late skull samples of Native American, Asiatic and Australian populations. We have tested the congruence of different competing scenarios against observed biological distances matrices computed on the different morphospaces: a shape space where covariation sources are summarized by a few common integrator factors between modules, or modular shape spaces where local factors influence specific regions of the skull (face and neurocranium).