Abstract
In order to reconstruct environments associated with Plio-Pleistocene hominins in southern Africa, researchers frequently rely upon the animals associated with the hominins, in particular, animals in the Family Bovidae. Bovids in southern Africa are typically identified by their teeth. However, identifying the taxon of a bovid tooth is challenging due to various biasing factors. Furthermore, inaccurate identification of fossil bovids can have significant consequences on the reconstructed paleoenvironment. Recent research on the classification of bovid fossil teeth has relied on using elliptical Fourier analysis to summarize the shape of the outline of the occlusal surface of the tooth and the resulting harmonic amplitudes. Currently, an expert in the field must manually place landmarks around the edges of each tooth which is slow and time consuming. This study tests whether it is possible to crowdsource this task, while maintaining the necessary level of quality needed to perform a statistical analysis on each tooth. Amazon Mechanical Turk workers place landmarks on the edge of the tooth which is compared to the performance of an expert in the field. The results suggest that crowdsourcing the digitization process is reliable and replicable. With the technical aspects of digitization managed, researchers can concentrate on analyzing and interpreting the data.
Highlights
Reconstructing past environments associated with early hominins is essential for understanding human evolution and is valuable for identifying habitat preferences, diet, and ecological relationships between hominins and other species
By more accurately identifying the bovids from sites associated with A. robustus using morphometrics, [4] was able to demonstrate that this hominin lived in a variety of habitats that changed over time; A
This study demonstrates that by taking the average shape of multiple Mechanical Turk workers, we can quickly obtain the outline the occlusal surface of a tooth that performs to the expert’s in terms of classification
Summary
Reconstructing past environments associated with early hominins is essential for understanding human evolution and is valuable for identifying habitat preferences, diet, and ecological relationships between hominins and other species. In order to reconstruct past environments, paleoanthropologists commonly rely on the animals that are found associated with the hominins. Animals in the Family Bovidae such as antelopes and buffalo are useful for this task due to their strict ecological tendencies [1,2,3]. Bovids are one of the most common fossils found in southern Africa, in particular isolated teeth.
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