Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1998

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Anthropology

Major Professor

Lyle W. Konigsberg

Committee Members

Andrew Kramer, Richard Jantz, Mike McKinney

Abstract

Researchers have long appreciated the significant relationship between body size and an animal's overall adaptive strategy and life history. However, much more emphasis has been placed on interpreting body size than on the actual calculation of it. One measure that is especially important for human evolutionary studies is stature. References to stature estimation can be found in the literature from over one hundred years. Despite this long history, stature estimation remains plagued by two methodological problems: 1) the choice of statistical estimator, and 2) the choice of reference population upon which to derive the parameters. This work addresses both of these problems. Three reference samples of known stature with maximum humerus and femur lengths recorded are used in this study: a large (N=2,209) modem human sample from North America, a smaller sample of modem African pygmies (N=19) from West Africa and a sample of African great apes (N=85). First, the performance of five commonly used regression models is examined: classical calibration, inverse calibration, major axis, reduced major axis and the zero intercept regression (ratio) model. These five techniques are rigorously tested in both univariate and multivariate categories for their ability to predict stature in situations where there is both extrapolation beyond the mean of the reference sample and differences in limb proportions. The performance of the five estimators is measured using both the root mean squared error and bias. Stature is also estimated for two well-known fossil hominids, A.L. 288-1 ("Lucy") and KNM-WT 15000 ("The Boy") using parameters derived from the reference samples. Results indicate that the choice of regression estimator remains unclear in situations where the allometry differs between the reference population and the sample population, which is often the case with fossil remains. Classical calibration performed best in almost all multivariate analyses of stature. However, results varied between the reduced major axis, inverse calibration and ratio models in univariate situations. Results of the fossil stature estimations vary depending on whether the data is univariate or multivariate. When estimating the stature of A.L. 288-1, results indicate that because of unique limb proportions, the human pygmy sample works best with the univariate data, but the chimpanzee sample came closest to Lucy's actual stature with multivariate data. However, since the limb proportions of the Nariokotome Boy are well within the modem human range, the large sample of modem humans was the best reference sample and the ratio model and the classical calibration estimator provided the closest estimates of stature to published values.

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