Paleontological, Palynological, Biological, and Physical Anthropology Graphs
The earliest paleontological spindle graphs appear in the 1830s and 1840s, and are of a different style and diagram different kinds of data (absolute frequencies of taxa or kinds) than the earliest archaeological spindle graphs. Palynologists regularly produce so-called pollen diagrams, left-justified spindle graphs, that display temporally varying frequencies of pollen of each of several different plant species. These first appeared in the 1910s, and are of a different style than early twentieth-century archaeological spindle graphs, although the data graphed by the two are similar (relative frequencies of specimens of each of several kinds of phenomena). Biologists used spindle graphs during the early twentieth century to plot both the phylogenetic history of taxonomic families and orders, and frequencies of individual organisms representing different plant and animal species found in different habitat types. Differences in styles of biological spindle graphs and early archaeological spindles suggest the idea for the latter was not in the biological sciences. Physical anthropologists “seriated” biometric data, but early twentieth-century textbooks do not include spindle graphs.