Anthropology takes control of morphometrics

There has been a startling change over the last decade in the intellectual context of morphometrics. In the 1990's, this field, which has not altered its focus upon the quantitative analysis of biomedical shape variation and shape change, was principally centered around concerns of medical image analysis; but now it is driven mainly by the demands of researchers in human variability, physical anthropology, primatology, and paleoanthropology instead. This essay celebrates that change and tries to account for it by reference to cognitive and intellectual aspects of the new home.