Craniomorphological Variation in the Mexican Population: A Comparison of the Northern, Central and Southern Regions
Date
2020-05
Authors
Dominguez Acosta, Paulina
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Abstract
Due to the current migrant crisis along the US-México border, numerous human remains remain unidentified due to the lack of proper data or information for the identification on the Hispanic population. Craniometric comparison between the regions in México has previously been done by Humphries (2015), and by Hughes (2013). Both researchers looked at cranial morphological variation in México while comparing the variation to the parental groups (European and Native American) and to geographical regions (Hughes et al., 2013; Humphries et al., 2015). The individuals analyzed are known Mexican nationals from UNAM, PCOME, OpID and XOCLAN-UADY. For the shape differences, discriminant function analysis and wireframe graphs were used. The size differences were analyzed through a one-way ANOVA and a follow up post-hoc test to see where there was significant variation.
The discriminant function analysis accurately classified 76.09% of the Northern region, 75.0% of the Central and 78.08% of the Southern region. Mahalanobis distances showed major differences between the Northern and the Southern region, while the Northern and the Central regions were more similar. The centroid size analysis showed violation on the assumption of equal variances (p= 0.001). Size differences between the regions showed statistical significance between the Northern and the Southern region (p= 0.001), and between the Central and Southern regions (p= 0.013). Overall, both shape and size differences were highly variable between the three regions.
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Keywords
Craniomorphology, Geometric morphometrics, Mexico, Size, Shape, Variation
Citation
Dominguez Acosta, P. (2020). <i>Craniomorphological variation in the Mexican population: A comparison of the northern, central and southern regions</i> (Unpublished thesis). Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.