University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses July 2017 Can Long Bone Structural Variability Detect Among-Population Relationships? Gina Agostini University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Biological and Physical Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Agostini, Gina, "Can Long Bone Structural Variability Detect Among-Population Relationships?" (2017). Doctoral Dissertations. 909. https://doi.org/10.7275/10008914.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/909 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CAN LONG BONE STRUCTURAL VARIABILITY DETECT AMONG- POPULATION RELATIONSHIPS? A Dissertation Presented by GINA MARIE AGOSTINI Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2017 Anthropology © Copyright by Gina Agostini 2017 All Rights Reserved CAN LONG BONE STRUCTURAL VARIABILITY DETECT AMONG-POPULATION RELATIONSHIPS? A Dissertation Presented By GINA MARIE AGOSTINI Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________________________ Brigitte M. Holt, Chair _______________________________________________ Laurie R. Godfrey, Member _______________________________________________ Joseph Hamill, Member _______________________________________________ John H. Relethford, Member __________________________________________ Jacqueline Urla, Department Head Anthropology DEDICATION To Josephine, Mario, Vivian, and William ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have many people to thank, starting with Blake, my partner in crime and person of infinite patience. I also thank my committee, Brigitte Holt, Laurie Godfrey, John Relethford, and Joe Hamill, for their guidance and patient advice. I thank my parents, Tracey and Michael, extended family, Shirley, Boomer, Katami, and “the Chinch.” I thank Sarah, Aurelie, Jill, Joe, Shwynn, Rachel, and Dan for their continued friendship even after I routinely abandoned them to collect data for 3-4 months at a time. Many thanks also to the people who helped me during my travels. I am especially appreciative to Marius Loots and Erica L’Abbé for kindly offering a place to stay, good conversations around the braai, introducing me to biltong, showing me the Cradle of Humanity, and otherwise facilitating my wonderful stay in South Africa. Thanks also to Petra Maas for teaching me how to navigate Cape Town transit—congratulations on your many successes. Many thanks to both Gloria Cassanova and Luca Pagani for sharing their home, their social network, and for introducing me to the Bialetti—perhaps the most important object I own. Thanks also to Ale Riga and Irene Dori for their friendship and for providing a forum to “nerd out” about limb bone robusticity. And thanks also to Margarida for showing me the in-and-outs of Lisbon, including the public versus private hospital systems! I thank the many museum curators who made this (and other) work possible— Diana Swales for accommodating my last-minute (somewhat panicked) request to visit the collections upon learning my intended samples were unexpectedly unavailable (ah, fieldwork…) and for hauling countless skeletons up from the basement for me to measure. To Elsa Pacciani not only for facilitating access to the collections in Florence, iv both for her lunchtime and travel companionship. To Marta Mirazon Lahr, Maria Giovonna Belcastro, Hugo Cardoso, Mafalda Madureira, Linda Greyling, Brendan Billings, and Alan Morris, all for their assistance accessing collections. And to my undergraduate research assistants: Amber Lopez, Jennifer Nadeau, Oshiomah Oyageshio, and Subhrangi Swain—I know you all have bright careers ahead of you. I also thank the many people who offered advice over the years. Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, Jay Stock, and Kristian Carlson, all of whom offered thoughtful feedback on a grant proposal e-mailed out of the blue. I thank Jason Kamilar for serving as collaborator, sounding board, and for showing me the ropes of R. Krista Harper, Lynnette Leidy-Sievert, Stephen King, and others who were always happy to meet, offer feedback, and otherwise serve as a support system. Many thanks to Michael Doube and Richard Domander for providing much-needed macro help with ImageJ. Finally, I thank the National Science Foundation (award #1411887), the Cultural Heritage of European Societies and Spaces or “CHESS” program (award # OISE- 0968575), and University of Massachusetts Amherst, all of whom have provided funds to support this and related projects over the past several years. v ABSTRACT CAN LONG BONE STRUCTURAL VARIABILITY DETECT AMONG- POPULATION RELATIONSHIPS? MAY 2017 GINA MARIE AGOSTINI, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS M.A., NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Brigitte Holt Phenotypic traits develop and are maintained by complex interactions between intrinsic (molecular) and extrinsic (environmental) factors. While the influence of intrinsic factors on adult craniomandibular variation has been intensively studied, less is known about limb bones, in part because it is assumed that their plasticity obscures intrinsic signals, especially those fixed early in life. While diaphyseal regions are plastic in response to activity, the extent to which they also reflect (phylo)genetic autocorrelation has not been sufficiently addressed, particularly given the common practice of comparing long bones across populations unevenly dispersed in space and time. Here I investigate the degree to which long bone lengths, joints, and diaphyses vary in their ability to detect intrinsic genetic patterns. I do this by calculating among- population genetic relationships via long bone variation in samples from England, Southern Europe, and South Africa. I then test whether these predictions significantly match those generated via craniofacial variation and, further, whether they are supported by contextual (historical) information. Given the innately plastic nature of diaphyseal regions, I further test whether differences in physical activity can obscure predicted genetic relationships. I do this by vi adding a temporal component to genetic distance analyses via inclusion of Medieval samples and by partitioning several Southern European samples into “high intensity” and “low intensity” subgroups based on recorded occupational data, using these to generate more genetic predictions. Results show that all three long bone properties reflect among-population genetic structure, with length and joint dimensions doing so at levels comparable to those of the crania. Diaphyses, however, generate lower levels of among-population differentiation, presumably because their plasticity fuels more intrapopulation variation. Despite this, diaphyses still detect key components of population genetic structure, including genetic affinity shared among modern English and descendant South Africans, the close genetic relationships among modern Southern Europeans (even when subdivided by occupation), and the ancestral connection between Medieval and modern English samples. In total, these results suggest that all long bone properties can detect among-population genetic information, and further, that interpretations of behavior from limb bone variation can be strengthened if genetic relationships (or assumed relationships) are controlled for. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................... x LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...................................................................................................... xvii 1. PROJECT OVERVIEW .............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Chapter 1 References ......................................................................................................... 7 2. BACKGROUND ....................................................................................................................... 13 2.1 Chapter Overview ............................................................................................................ 13 2.2 Molecular Development ................................................................................................... 13 2.3 Function Throughout Development ................................................................................. 24 2.4 Bone Functional Adaptation: Overview and Application ................................................ 30 2.5 “Applied” Bone Functional Adaptation ..........................................................................