Habitat preference of extant African bovids based on astragalus morphology: operationalizing ecomorphology for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction

The habitat preferences of fauna found at palaeontological and archaeological sites can be used to investigate ancient environments and hominin habitat preferences. Here we present a discriminant function model linking astragalus morphology to four broadly defined habitat categories (open, light cover, heavy cover, and closed) using modern bovids of known ecology. Twenty-four measurements were taken on a sample of 286 astragali from 36 extant African antelope species. These measurements were used to generate ratios reflecting shape. An 11 variable discriminant function model was developed that had high classification success rates for complete astragali. Resubstitution analysis, jackknife analysis, and the classification of several “test samples” of specimens suggest that the predictive accuracy of this model is around 87%. The total classification success rates of 87% (jackknifed) or 93% (resubstitution) are considerably higher than those derived in another study of bovid astragalus ecomorphology (67%; DeGusta, D., Vrba, E.S., 2003. A method for inferring palaeohabitats from the functional morphology of bovid astragali. J. Archaeol. Sci. 30, 1009–1022]) that used a more limited measurement scheme and a smaller sample of bovids than the present study. Different approaches to operationalizing ecomorphic analyses are considered in order to best extract accurate palaeoenvironmental information from palaeontological and archaeological datasets.