LE PEUPLEMENT DE L’ASIE DU SUD-EST PAR HOMO SAPIENS : ANALYSE DE LA VARIABILITE MORPHOLOGIQUE DES MOLAIRES DEFINITIVES HUMAINES

The biological diversity of modern humans in Southeast Asia has long been regarded as resulting of two major migrations waves. Nevertheless, alternative and/or more complex scenarios have also been proposed. Analysis of the morphological variability of osteological and dental archaeological series is a corner stone as they are direct evidence of the main past events that shaped the modern human diversity in the region. The present study is based on a comparative analysis of the crown contour shape of permanent modern human molars with the combined advantages of a large archaeological sampling and the use of methods which allow detecting and quantifying low intraspecific morphological changes (size and shape of human teeth have a high degree of heritabiliy). The sample includes 1537 modern human molars from Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, Australia and Melanesia; 661 are coming from various chrono‐cultural periods spanning from the Upper Pleistocene to the sub‐actual period. Important methodological developments presented in this work circumvent major difficulties due to particular crown features of human molars: (i) development of a new procedure for the normalization (= standardization) of molar crown outlines that allows using elliptic Fourier analysis, (ii) creation of a new method for the determination of the rank of isolated modern human molars that is highly reliable (≤5% of misclassifications). Our results, based on quantified patterns of shape and size diversity, morphological affinities as well as elaboration and test of design matrices modeling main hypotheses for the peopling of Southeast Asia, are congruent with scenarios based on series of migratory processes since the Upper Pleistocene. Sea level variations (especially at the Last Glacial Maximum) and demic diffusion of the “Neolithic” in certain regions are likely to impact significantly on the structure of the biological diversity of modern humans in Southeast Asia. The major outcomes of the present study are congruent with the results of several recent genetic works in the region. In conclusion, Southeast Asia is a key region for future development aiming at understanding the history and diversity of Homo sapiens

Small Size in the Philippine Human Fossil Record: Is It Meaningful for a Better Understanding of the Evolutionary History of the Negritos?

Pygmy populations are recognized in several places over the world, especially in Western Africa and in Southeast Asia (Philippine negritos, for instance). Broadly defined as small-bodied Homo sapiens (compared with neighboring populations), their origins and the nature of the processes involved in the maintenance of their phenotype over time are highly debated. Major results have been recently obtained from population genetics on present-day negrito populations, but their evolutionary history remains largely unresolved. We present and discuss the Upper Pleistocene human remains recovered from Tabon Cave and Callao Cave in the Philippines, which are potentially highly relevant to these research questions. Human fossils have been recovered in large numbers from Tabon Cave (Palawan Island) but mainly from reworked and mixed sediments from several archaeological layers. We review and synthesize the long and meticulous collaborative work done on the archives left from the 1960s excavations and on the field. The results demonstrate the long history of human occupations in the cave, since at least ~30,000 BP. The examination of the Tabon human remains shows a large variability: large and robust for one part of the sample, and small and gracile for the other part. The latter would fit quite comfortably within the range of variation of Philippine negritos. Farther north, on Luzon Island, the human third metatarsal recently recovered from Callao Cave and dated to ~66,000 BP is now the oldest direct evidence of human presence in the Philippines. Previous data show that, compared with H. sapiens (including Philippine negritos), this bone presents a very small size and several unusual morphological characteristics. We present a new analytical approach using three-dimensional geometric morphometrics for comparing the Callao fossil to a wide array of extant Asian mammals, including nonhuman primates and H. sapiens. The results demonstrate that the shape of the Callao metatarsal is definitely closer to humans than to any other groups. The fossil clearly belongs to the genus Homo; however, it remains at the margin of the variation range of H. sapiens. Because of its great antiquity and the presence of another diminutive species of the genus Homo in the Wallace area during this time period (H. floresiensis), we discuss here in detail the affinities and potential relatedness of the Callao fossil with negritos that are found today on Luzon Island

Homo luzonensis : principales caractéristiques et implications pour l’histoire évolutionnaire du genre

La nouvelle espèce Homo luzonensis a été décrite en 2019 à partir d’un assemblage constitué de treize éléments fossiles découverts dans la grotte de Callao (île de Luzon, Philippines) en 2007, 2011 et 2015. La datation directe de deux de ces fossiles par les séries de l’uranium indique des âges minimums respectifs de 50 000 et 67 000 ans. Dans cette présentation, nous montrons que ces spécimens présentent une combinaison de caractéristiques morphologiques primitives (i.e. ressemblant à Austra..

Technical Note: Anatomic Identification of Isolated Modern Human Molars: Testing Procrustes Aligned Outlines as a Standardization Procedure for Elliptic Fourier Analysis

The determination of the precise position of permanent first and second modern human molars, following standard tooth identification criteria, is often difficult because of their morphological similarities. Here, we proposed to evaluate the suitability of two- dimensional crown contour shape analysis in achieving this objective. The method was tested separately on 180 first and second maxillary molars (UM) and 180 first and second mandibular molars (LM) securely identified (in anatomical position in their sockets). Generalized Pro- crustes superimposition is used to normalize the outlines prior to applying elliptic Fourier analyses ("EFAproc" method). Reliability and effectiveness of this morphomet- ric procedure was evaluated by comparing the results obtained for the same dataset with four other morpho- metric methods of contour analysis. Cross-validated ("leave one individual out") percentages of misclassifica- tion yielded by linear discriminant analyses were used for determining the anatomic position of modern human molars. The percentages of misclassifications obtained from every method of contour analysis were low (1.67% to 3.33% for the UM, 5.56% to 6.67% for the LM) indicat- ing the high suitability of crown contour analyses in cor- rectly identifying molars. A reliable protocol, based on predictive linear discriminant analyses, was then pro- posed for identification of isolated molars. In addition, our results confirmed that the EFAproc method is suita- ble for normalizing outlines prior to undertaking elliptic Fourier analyses, especially in the case of nearly circular outlines: it obtained better classification than the classic method of normalization of Fourier descriptors for UM and provided also some advantages over the three landmarks-based methods tested here

Les ossements humains de la grotte de Tabon (Palawan, Philippines) : Répartition spatiale et étude d’une collection d’ossements inédite

La renommée de la grotte de Tabon provient de la découverte dans les années 1960 de 3 fossiles d’Homo sapiens datant de la fin du Pléistocène supérieur. En dépit de leur importance, aucune publication n’a jamais décrit le contexte de découverte de ces ossements ni des centaines d’autres restes humains mis au jour. A partir de la redécouverte récente de documents d’archive créés au moment des fouilles et d’une collection de 204 ossements humains dans les réserves du National Museum of the Philippines, nous avons créé un système d’information géographique permettant d’étudier la répartition spatiale de l’ensemble du matériel mis au jour dans les années 1960 et d’en déduire le contexte de découverte de l’ensemble des restes humains. Cette étude a permis de relocaliser la découverte de 2 des 3 fossiles célèbres et de repérer des ossements humains anciens supplémentaires mis au jour en association avec une industrie lithique datée d’environ 20000 BP. Par ailleurs, une sélection de 14 ossements potentiellement anciens (Pléistocène ?) a été réalisée en combinant l’analyse de la répartition spatiale avec l’état de conservation des ossements. S’ils sont confirmés, ces résultats permettraient d’augmenter drastiquement le nombre d’ossements humains pré- Holocène connus en Asie du Sud-Est insulaire

Évaluation de la croissance fœtale humaine par la confrontation des structures osseuses de la base du crâne

International audienc

The Quest for New Empowered Citizen Scientists

Citizen science is well-known as being a very efficient means collecting large amounts of data at a global scale. However, even if it seems nice to collect observations about flowering plants and singing birds, people living in today’s world need to understand this global biodiversity crisis is here to stay. We need to move past the human sensor paradigm and learn to incorporate the general public in the entire research process. We need to move from cheap data labour to truly empowered citizen scientists and realise that stakeholders may not have complex scientific questions but still have questions about their environment. We need to move from citizen science to participatory science (Hinckson et al. 2017,Katapally 2019,Poncet and Turcati 2017), if we want to tackle the challenges we will be facing in the coming years. Natural Solutions has developed a number of gamified citizen science applications in the past (ecoBalade, Biolit, Sauvage de ma rue, INPN espèces, GeoNature Citizen), through which we have gained a good understanding of what works. Our last project is to create a citizen acting mobile platform using cognitive bias to nudge citizen in acting toward biodiversity. The application will be part of the IUCN congress taking part in Marseille in 2020

Couplage des processus de maturation et de croissance : contribution à l’estimation de l’âge au décès des fœtus et des nourrissons en contexte médico-légal

International audienc

Web Applications for Interoperability of Biodiversity Data in France

In the context of the French law for the reconquest of biodiversity (Legifrance 2016), public and private stakeholders must share environmental impact assessment data as open data to the French National Inventory of the Natural Heritage (Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle 2019). In order to achieve this, the Information System for Nature and Landscape (SINP) provided standards and guidelines for protocols, taxonomy, and metadata in order to comply with the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability; Wilkinson et al. 2016) concept of data management. However, private institutions, who must run environmental impact assessments, can be confused by the number of technical details and the high level of data literacy needed to comply with these standards. Here, we will present several tools (GeoNature 2019, Natural Solutions 2019) that we are currently developing to facilitate the raw biodiversity data conversion and export using SINP standards (Jomier et al. 2018). Although SINP and Darwin Core (Wieczorek et al. 2012) standards share common concepts and properties, SINP standards focus on data reusability in the framework of French environmental programs, resulting in the creation of specific mandatory attributes (Chataigner et al. 2014). Our tools perform extract, transform and load (ETL) operations as well as RDF (Resource Description Framework) exports using ad-hoc ontology adapted to the specificities of the SINP standard. Finally, we observed that despite the success of the process (after one year, nearly one thousand datasets are available on the SINP web platform), several issues still need to be addressed, including data quality issues, which could hamper data reuse by stakeholders

Estimation de l’âge fœtal : nouvelles avancées

International audienc