Geometric morphometrics in anthropology

The study of geometric morphometrics in anthropology has made a major impact on the field of morphometrics by aiding in some of the technological and methodological advancements. Geometric morphometrics is an approach that studies shape using Cartesian landmark and semilandmark coordinates that are capable of capturing morphologically distinct shape variables. The landmarks can be analyzed using various statistical techniques separate from size, position, and orientation so that the only variables being observed are based on morphology. Geometric morphometrics is used to observe variation in numerous formats, especially those pertaining to evolutionary and biological processes, which can be used to help explore the answers to a lot of questions in physical anthropology. Geometric morphometrics is part of a larger subfield in anthropology, which has more recently been named virtual anthropology. Virtual anthropology looks at virtual morphology, the use of virtual copies of specimens to perform various quantitative analyses on shape (such as geometric morphometrics) and form...

The field of geometric morphometrics grew out of the accumulation of improvements of methods and approaches over several decades beginning with Francis Galton (1822-1911). Galton was a polymath and the president of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. In 1907 he invented a way to quantify facial shapes using a base-line registration approach for shape comparisons. This was later adapted by Fred Bookstein and termed “two-point coordinates” or “Bookstein-shape coordinates”.

In the 1940s, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (biologist and mathematician, 1860-1948) looked at ways to quantify that could be attached to biological shape based on developmental and evolutionary theories. This led to the first branch of multivariate morphometrics, which emphasized matrix manipulations involving variables. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fred Bookstein (currently a professor of Anthropology at the University of Vienna) began using Cartesian transformations and David George Kendall (statistician, 1918-2007) showed that figures that hold the same shape can be treated as separate points in a geometric space. Finally, in 1996, Leslie Marcus (paleontologist, 1930-2002) convinced colleagues to use morphometrics on the famous Ötzi skeleton, which helped expose the importance of the applications of these methods.

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