Abstract

The use of reindeer has been a crucial element in the subsistence strategies of past Arctic and Subarctic populations. However, the spatiotemporal occurrence of systematic herding practices has been difficult to identify in the bioarchaeological record. To address this research gap, this study proposes a new virtual anthropological approach for reconstructing habitual physical activity in reindeer, relying on the protocols of the “Validated Entheses based Reconstruction of Activity” (VERA) method. Following blind analytical procedures, we focused on eight muscle attachment sites (“entheses”) in 36 reindeer free ranging in the wild, 21 specimens in captivity (zoo), and eight racing reindeer (habitual runners). Importantly, our analyses accounted for the effects of variation by subspecies, sex, age, and estimated body size. Our results showed clear differences across activity groups, leading to the development of discriminant function equations with cross-validated accuracies ranging from approximately 88 to 100%. The reliability of our functions was additionally confirmed using a blind test involving six zoo individuals not included in the initial dataset. Our findings support the use of the proposed approach for identifying domestication-related activities in zooarchaeological contexts, introducing a valuable tool for locating suspected domestication hotspots and elucidating the nature of past human-reindeer interactions.

中文翻译：

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使用 3D 肌肉附着区域重建驯鹿驯化模式

摘要

使用驯鹿一直是过去北极和亚北极人口生存策略的关键要素。然而，在生物考古记录中很难确定系统性放牧实践的时空发生。为了解决这一研究空白，本研究提出了一种新的虚拟人类学方法，依靠“基于验证的活动重建”（VERA）方法的协议来重建驯鹿的习惯性身体活动。按照盲分析程序，我们重点关注了 36 只野生驯鹿、21 只圈养驯鹿（动物园）和 8 只竞赛驯鹿（习惯奔跑的驯鹿）的 8 个肌肉附着部位（“附着点”）。重要的是，我们的分析考虑了亚种、性别、年龄和估计体型差异的影响。我们的结果显示不同活动组之间存在明显差异，从而开发出交叉验证准确度约为 88% 至 100% 的判别函数方程。我们的功能的可靠性还通过一项盲测得到了证实，该测试涉及未包含在初始数据集中的六名动物园个体。我们的研究结果支持使用所提出的方法来识别动物考古背景中的驯化相关活动，引入一个有价值的工具来定位可疑的驯化热点并阐明过去人类与驯鹿相互作用的本质。