The use of Micro-Photogrammetry and Geometric Morphometrics for identifying carnivore agency in bone assemblages

Abstract

Before sedimentation, bones are exposed to an important amount of biostratinomic taphonomic processes. One of them is related to the action of carnivores, which is reflected in conspicuous tooth marks, such as pits, scores, punctures or furrowing. Different carnivores damage bone assemblages differently. Thus, several researches have tried to identify carnivore agency based on different parameters such as skeletal profiles, tooth mark frequencies and dimensions, breakage patterns, or more recently, taphotypes. Here we propose a new methodology based on the analysis of tooth scores to determine the carnivore type involved in bone modification. For this purpose, we have built 3D models of several tooth scores produced by wolves, lions, jaguars, foxes and hyenas using photogrammetric techniques. These models were later analyzed by means of Geometric Morphometrics and multivariate statistics. We show that although there is a high degree of overlap in tooth mark morphology, the combined action of tooth score dimensions and morphology enables the identification of some of the tooth scores made by lions from those of the other carnivores with a higher degree of confidence than any other inter-carnivore comparison.