Doctoral Dissertation Research: Modeling hominin variability in Australopithecus africanus

博士论文研究：非洲南方古猿的人类变异建模

• 批准号: 1613401
• 负责人: Frederick Grine
• 金额: $ 2.19万
• 依托单位: SUNY at Stony Brook
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-07-15 至 2022-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1613401&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Modeling; hominin

One of the fundamental goals of anthropological research is to understand humanity's biological origins and evolution, for which the hominin fossil record is a primary source of data. However, it is difficult to determine, for a given time period and location, whether the relatively limited and fragmentary hominin fossils represent one or multiple species. Such is the case for South African fossils attributed to the species Australopithecus africanus. The variability in this assemblage of fossils has been proposed to represent more than one species, but there is little agreement about how to sort the various fossils. Determining species designations for this assemblage is important because it affects interpretations of A. africanus as a direct ancestor of our own genus Homo and therefore our understanding of how and where the genus Homo evolved. By incorporating methods from systematic biology and developing new statistical methods, this research will provide a necessary framework to define hominin fossil species and address diversity in hominin evolution. This project will also support training and mentoring of students, including from groups underrepresented in STEM fields, science outreach to high school students, and scan data that will be made available through Morphosource. The recognition of species in the fossil record is of critical importance to understanding hominin evolution and diversity. A vast literature exists on species concepts, but process-based definitions cannot be easily applied to fossil species. Accordingly, levels of variation within purported hypodigms have typically been used to delineate hominin species, but such approaches rest on the problematic assumption that these parameters are comparable in extinct and extant species. Elsewhere in biology, methods have been developed that use the structure of variance within a sample to detect the presence of discrete species. Despite continued controversy over hominin species delineation, these methods have yet to be employed in anthropology. Australopithecus africanus exemplifies this problem. Resolving its alpha taxonomy is critically important to interpreting human evolution, but it remains a contentious issue. The possibility that A. africanus subsumes two or more species has significant implications for the interpretation of the hominin phylogeny and the evolution of the genus Homo. The goal of this research is to quantitatively model species variation in extant primates and fossil hominins in order to re-evaluate the taxonomic heterogeneity of the A. africanus assemblage. This will be accomplished by using phylogenetic comparative methods to estimate an appropriate null hypothesis model of hominin variability. Data will be collected from 3D surfaces of extant primate and fossil hominin teeth using landmarks, semi-landmarks, and GIS-based approaches. The data from this study will provide a detailed model of hominin variability using both mixture models and matrix correlation analyses.

人类学研究的基本目标之一是了解人类的生物学起源和进化，对此，人类化石记录是数据的主要来源。但是，在给定的时间段和位置很难确定相对有限和零碎的人类化石代表一个或多种物种。南非化石归因于Australopithecus Africanus的这种情况。已经提出，这种化石组合的变异性代表多种物种，但是关于如何对各种化石进行分类几乎没有共识。确定该组合的物种名称很重要，因为它影响了非洲曲霉作为我们自己属的直接祖先的解释，因此我们对同性恋属的发展方式和地点的理解。通过纳入系统生物学的方法并开发新的统计方法，这项研究将提供一个必要的框架来定义人类化石物种并解决人类进化中的多样性。该项目还将支持学生的培训和指导，包括来自STEM领域中代表性不足的团体，对高中生的科学宣传以及将通过Morphosource提供的扫描数据。化石记录中对物种的认识对于理解人类的进化和多样性至关重要。关于物种概念的文献存在，但是基于过程的定义不能轻易应用于化石物种。因此，通常使用了所谓的降低物质中的变异水平来描述人类素种，但是这种方法取决于这些参数在灭绝和现存的物种中相当的有问题的假设。在生物学的其他地方，已经开发了使用样品内的方差结构来检测离散物种的存在的方法。尽管对人类种类的描述持续争议，但这些方法尚未用于人类学。 Australopithecus Africanus举例说明了这个问题。解决其α分类法对于解释人类进化至关重要，但仍然是一个有争议的问题。非洲链球菌属于两个或多个物种的可能性对解释人类系统发育和同性恋属的进化具有重要意义。这项研究的目的是定量地模拟现有灵长类动物和化石人类素的物种变化，以重新评估非洲链球菌组合的分类异质性。这将通过使用系统发育比较方法来估计适当的人类变异性的合适的假设模型来实现。数据将从现存的灵长类动物和化石人类牙齿的3D表面采用地标，半标记和基于GIS的方法收集。这项研究的数据将使用混合模型和基质相关分析提供详细的人类变异性模型。