Sexual dimorphism among Mesoamerican turkeys: A key for understanding past husbandry

International audience"Few animals have been domesticated in Mesoamerica and the organization of husbandry practices in this part of the world remains little known. The turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), one of these few animals, shows an evident sexual dimorphism that allows for the analysis of past demographic structure from the study of archaeological bone remains. Here we document sexual dimorphism in turkey populations from the Classic to the Post classic (200–1521 CE) in northern Mesoamerica. We present a morphometric approach based on both size and shape that allows the distinction of two groups in the archaeological populations, corresponding to males and females. Group delimitation with no prior knowledge of their number and parameters is conducted with Gaussian mixture analyses. The accuracy of the method was first evaluated using bibliographic data from the Southwestern USA and then applied on 120 Mesoamerican bone remains of unknown sex coming from five archaeological sites. We point out an imbalanced sex-ratio in Mesoamerican turkey flocks that account for more females than males. We also show that there were no significant size variations between the different sites tested in this study even if they are situated in both lowlands and highlands." (source éditeur