Dipartimento di Storie e Metodi per la Conservazione dei Beni Culturali, University of Bologna, 48121 Ravenna, Italy.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 2012 Dec;149(4):628-38. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.22177. Epub 2012 Nov 2.
Procrustes-based geometric morphometrics (GM) is most often applied to problems of craniofacial shape variation. Here, we demonstrate a novel application of GM to the analysis of whole postcranial elements in a study of 77 hominoid tibiae. We focus on two novel methodological improvements to standard GM approaches: 1) landmark configurations of tibiae including 15 epiphyseal landmarks and 483 semilandmarks along articular surfaces and muscle insertions along the tibial shaft and 2) an artificial affine transformation that sets moments along the shaft equal to the sum of the moments estimated in the other two anatomical directions. Diagrams of the principal components of tibial shapes support most differences between human and non-human primates reported previously. The artificial affine transformation proposed here results in an improved clustering of the great apes that may prove useful in future discriminant or clustering studies. Since the shape variations observed may be related to different locomotor behaviors, posture, or activity patterns, we suggest that this method be used in functional analyses of tibiae or other long bones in modern populations or fossil specimens.
基于普罗克鲁斯的几何形态测量学（GM）最常用于颅面形态变异的问题。在这里，我们展示了 GM 在对 77 个类人猿胫骨的整体后肢骨骼元素分析中的一种新应用。我们专注于对标准 GM 方法的两个新的方法学改进：1）胫骨的标志配置，包括 15 个骨骺标志和 483 个沿关节表面和沿胫骨干的肌肉插入处的半标志；2）人工仿射变换，使沿干的矩等于在另外两个解剖方向上估计的矩的总和。胫骨形状的主成分图支持以前报道的人类与非人类灵长类动物之间的大多数差异。这里提出的人工仿射变换导致了大猿类的聚类得到了改善，这可能在未来的判别或聚类研究中证明是有用的。由于观察到的形状变化可能与不同的运动行为、姿势或活动模式有关，因此我们建议在现代人群或化石标本中使用这种方法对胫骨或其他长骨进行功能分析。
