Mathematics and the Lifeway of Mesopithecus

International audience; Based on a critical statistical reanalysis of biometrical raw data from calcaneal morphology recently published by Youlatos (2003), I infer that the most similar extant Cercopithecidae to Mesopithecus pentelicus from the Late Miocene of Pikermi, Greece are arboreal, suggesting that M. pentelicus is also best regarded as arboreal rather than semiterrestrial or terrestrial. I used 2 different approaches: 1. Fisher's overall and Holm's multiple-hypothesis tests and 2. bootstrapped cluster analysis of a Mahalanobis generalized distance matrix. From a strictly methodological point of view, the results emphasize a well-known but frequently ignored problem: biometrical descriptors are usually intercorrelated variables, a characteristic that can strongly bias the results of quantitative comparisons between individuals or species.