There has been a startling change over the last decade in the intellectual context of
morphometrics. In the 1990’s, this field, which has not altered its focus upon the quantitative
analysis of biomedical shape variation and shape change, was principally centered
around concerns of medical image analysis; but now it is driven mainly by the demands
of researchers in human variability, physical anthropology, primatology, and
paleoanthropology instead. This essay celebrates that change and tries to account for it
by reference to cognitive and intellectual aspects of the new home