Mugharet el’Aliya: Adapting the method of surface registration to the hominin fossil record

Abstract

When hearing the words ‘human fossil’, most people have a few famous fossils in mind. However, besides well-known, rather complete, iconic specimens, the hominin fossil record mainly comprises fragmentary remains. Technological improvements in the last decades allow us to analyze fragmented and/or damaged fossils in a comprehensive framework and study materials that could not be analyzed in depth at the time of their discovery (e.g., Zollikofer et al., 2005; Hublin et al., 2017; Harvati et al., 2019; Bosman et al., 2019). Most of these improvements are part of the field of virtual anthropology and the toolkit of geometric morphometrics.