A Quantitative Analysis of European Quaternary Equids

Although so much of work have been done about the anatomy and systematics of Quaternary horses but still the story of Equus shows some missing links in the natural history of horse. In this present work the researcher has made an attempt to classify Horses (discriminate between species or group of species) on the basis of size, sex and shape analysis by using two Multivariate statistical methods. The objective is to trace out the sex ratio, and establish degree of sexual dimorphism in fossil horses from Italian peninsula; to characterize the structure of horse bones on the basis of size and shape analysis occur from Pleistocene to Holocene with the help of Mixture analysis and Principal Component Analysis. In the conclusion, it can be said that the sex ratio lies between 68%-32% approximately and also there is almost clear separation between the fossil data have been (they are not overlapping each other except Eisenmann Data which is a heterogeneous one) used in the present work in Size and Shape analysis, which indicating three factors that may be they have different taxonomy, different chronology and different environmental conditions.