Mandibular shape and diet in extant primates: a 3D geometric morphometric analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Establishing a link between mandibular morphology and diet in extant primates has long been a goal in biological anthropology because it should provide important insight into the diets of extinct primates, including fossil hominins. To date, efforts to explore this question have produced mixed results, largely perhaps due to a reliance on the use of 2D morphological data. Here, we report a study where we investigated whether 3D shape data would provide a clearer picture. We used geometric morphometrics to analyse 3D mandibular shape variation in a sample of > 200 primate specimens, representing individuals from 27 species and five families. Two sets of analyses investigated i) whether there was a relationship between mandibular shape and four standard dietary categories and ii) whether there was a relationship between mandibular shape and a well-known index of diet quality. We found an association between mandibular shape and the dietary categories when we employed raw Procrustes coordinates and allometry-free residuals, but the relationship was weak to non-existent when the effects of phylogeny were taken into account. We found no relationship between shape and the diet quality index, no matter whether the data were raw, corrected for the effects of allometry, corrected for the effects of phylogeny, or corrected for the effects of both allometry and phylogeny. Taken together, the results of the two sets of analyses suggest that there is a weak relationship between 3D mandibular shape and diet in extant primates. Allometry and phylogeny appear to be more important influences on the 3D shape of extant primate mandibles than is diet. We conclude from this that 3D analysis of mandibular shape is unlikely to further illuminate the diets of extinct primates, and research efforts should, therefore, be directed elsewhere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".