Abstract:
|
In order to reconstruct environments associated with Plio-Pleistocene hominins in southern Africa, researchers typically rely upon animals associated with the hominins, in particular, animals in the Family Bovidae. Bovid dental remains dominate the South African fossil assemblages. Nonetheless, taxonomic identification of bovid teeth is often imprecise and subjective due to various biasing factors and the inaccurate identification of fossil bovids can have significant consequences for environmental reconstructions.
Recent research into classification of fossil bovid 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 high quality 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.
|