Department of Engineering, King's College London, London, UK.
Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, UK.
Evol Anthropol. 2024 Apr;33(2):e22019. doi: 10.1002/evan.22019. Epub 2024 Jan 13.
Biomechanics is the set of tools that explain organismal movement and mechanical behavior and links the organism to the physicality of the world. As such, biomechanics can relate behaviors and culture to the physicality of the organism. Scale is critical to biomechanical analyses, as the constitutive equations that matter differ depending on the scale of the question. Within anthropology, biomechanics has had a wide range of applications, from understanding how we and other primates evolved to understanding the effects of technologies, such as the atlatl, and the relationship between identity, society, culture, and medical interventions, such as prosthetics. Like any other model, there is great utility in biomechanical models, but models should be used primarily for hypothesis testing and not data generation except in the rare case where models can be robustly validated. The application of biomechanics within anthropology has been extensive, and holds great potential for the future.
生物力学是一组工具，用于解释生物体的运动和力学行为，并将生物体与世界的物理性质联系起来。因此，生物力学可以将行为和文化与生物体的物理性质联系起来。尺度对于生物力学分析至关重要，因为不同尺度的问题所涉及的本构方程也不同。在人类学中，生物力学有广泛的应用，从了解我们和其他灵长类动物是如何进化的，到了解技术（如投矛器）的影响，以及身份、社会、文化和医疗干预（如假肢）之间的关系。与任何其他模型一样，生物力学模型具有很大的实用性，但模型主要应该用于假设检验，而不是数据生成，除非在极少数情况下模型可以得到稳健验证。生物力学在人类学中的应用非常广泛，并且具有很大的发展潜力。
