Visualizing shape transformation between chimpanzee and human braincases

Abstract

The quantitative comparison of the form of the braincase is a central issue in paleoanthropology (i.e., the study of human evolution based on fossil evidence). The major difficulty is that there are only few locations defining biological correspondence between individual braincases. In this paper, we use mesh parameterization techniques to tackle this problem. We propose a method to conformally parameterize the genus-0 surface of the braincase on the sphere and to calibrate the parameterization to match biological constraints. The resulting consistent parameterization gives detailed information about shape differences between the braincase of human and chimp. This opens up new perspectives for the quantitative comparison of "featureless” biological structures