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Virtual Anthropology and Biomechanics

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Handbook of Paleoanthropology

Abstract

The scarcity of fossil hominins imposes the obligation to extract as much information as possible from the few existing remains. Virtual anthropology exploits digital technologies in an interdisciplinary framework to study the morphology of specimens in 3D and 4D. It can contribute to this aim because structures are easily accessible, powerful morphometric analyses can inform about intragroup and between-group form and shape variation, data manipulations and reconstructions become more reproducible, and sample sizes can be increased via sharing of electronic data. The six main areas of virtual anthropology – digitize, expose, compare, reconstruct, materialize, and share – are introduced in this chapter. Biomechanics on the other hand allows inferring certain aspects of function via the study of loadings in structures. Though an efficient formal bridge between those two domains is still missing, there are many overlaps and cross-fertilizations visible, possibly leading into a “virtual functional morphology” to better understand evolutionary adaptations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Vienna, Althanstr. 14, A-1090, Wien, Austria

    Gerhard W. Weber

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  1. Gerhard W. Weber
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Correspondence to Gerhard W. Weber .

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  1. Institut für Anthropologie, Johannes-Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, Germany

    Winfried Henke

  2. Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York, USA

    Ian Tattersall

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Weber, G.W. (2015). Virtual Anthropology and Biomechanics. In: Henke, W., Tattersall, I. (eds) Handbook of Paleoanthropology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39979-4_72

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