Abstract
The presence of a weak occipital bun in some Upper Paleolithic European fossils is often cited as evidence for admixture between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans, because the “chignon” morphology is considered by many to be a derived Neanderthal trait.
It is impossible, however, to split this morphology into “present” or “absent” character states (and thus “primitive” or “derived”); it rather varies in continuous degrees of expression. Furthermore the shape of the upper scale of the occipital bone is tightly integrated with the shape of the other bones forming the vault. To assess whether the “hemibun” of some Upper Paleolithic European crania should be considered evidence for possible hybridization, it is thus crucial to understand the integration of this morphology and whether this shape feature is homologous between modern humans and Neanderthals. Here we present a geometric morphometric analysis assessing the integration of the posterior midsagittal profile and the temporal bone quantitatively. We digitized 3-D coordinates of anatomical landmarks on the posterior vault and semilandmarks along a midsagittal curve from bregma to inion on 356 modern and archaic human crania. These points were converted into shape coordinates using Procrustes superimposition and then analyzed using the method of singular warps. The occurrence of an occipital bun is highly correlated with a flat parietal midline and an anteriorly positioned temporal bone. While Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens cannot be distinguished from recent humans, archaic Homo fall outside the range of modern variation. The pattern of integration however, which accounts for ∼30% of the total variation, is shared between modern humans and archaic Homo. Our results suggest that the occurrence of “hemibuns” in UPE should not be used as evidence for admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals, as this morphology is a predictable correlate of the relative position of the temporal bone and not an independent trait.
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Acknowledgments
We thank all the curators and collections managers in several institutions across Europe, Africa and the USA, for kindly allowing access to both fossil and extant material used in this study. We thank Maximilian v. Harling for the CT scan used to create surface morphs, and Silvana Condemi for her efforts putting together this volume. We are also grateful to Jean-Jacques Hublin, Tim Weaver, Fred Bookstein, Philipp Mitteröcker, Markus Bastir, Susan Antón, Dan Lieberman and two anonymous reviewers for providing very helpful comments and suggestions. This research was funded in its various stages by grants to KH by the American Museum of Natural History; NYCEP; the Onassis and the CARE Foundations; and the U.S. National Science Foundation. Support was also provided by New York University, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the “EVAN” Marie Curie Research Training Network MRTN-CT-019564. This is NYCEP morphometrics contribution number 34.
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Gunz, P., Harvati, K. (2011). Integration and Homology of “Chignon” and “Hemibun” Morphology. In: Condemi, S., Weniger, GC. (eds) Continuity and Discontinuity in the Peopling of Europe. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0492-3_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0492-3_17
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