Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Scaling Method: Body Mass Reconstruction Of East African Hominins, Julianna Rose

Anthropology Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis details a series of novel methods developed to estimate body masses of hominin fossils using 3-D point cloud registration software. All analyses were conducted through 3-D modeling software that supported the remote study of five fossil femora from East Africa. The fossil computer models were repeatedly aligned with anatomically modern human femora to determine their scaling relationship with the objective of using the scaling factor of the human references to estimate the body mass of the fossils, on the basis of the femoral head breadth. Body mass estimates obtained through this technique were compared to estimates using more …