Cranial Indexing

I wrote
<<Does Danish culture show a clear pattern of IE material culture back to
neolithic times?>>

"tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> replied:
<<It's a matter of interpretation. According to what I read in
Albrectsen (see also earlier postings), skulls in Danish Neolithic
graves are mixed doligocephalic and brachycephalic, while those of
the newly introduced inhumation graves in Early Roman Iron Age (0-200
CE) are mostly doligocephalic. It is tempting to assume an invasion
(or two) in the interim period, eg. around 0 (and another one,
Cimbrian?, at 500 BCE).>>

Well, at least that looks like some evidence of dolichocephalic "population
continuity" in that region, for what that is worth. Genetic (biochemical)
evidence for the general region is somewhat more supportive.

But population continuity is not the same thing as cultural continuity.
Populations may gradually shift, burial practices may change but general
culture can stay contiguous (e.g., the Sumerian/Akkadian example.)

HOWEVER, regarding the use of craniometry, be aware that it has a pretty bad
reputation in many quarters. A friend writes:

"Some prominent American anthropoligists were badly embarassed by their use
of craniometry. After making strong claims that it was a true measure of
genetic factors, they watched it methodically demolished in a few swift blows
by the great German-born American anthropologist and linguist Franz Boas.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote, 'Boas,...made short work of the fabled cranial index
by showing it varied widely among adults of a single group and within the
life of an individual. (Boas, 1899). Moreover, he found significant
differences in cranial index between immigrant parents and their
American-born children. The immutable obtuseness of the brachycephalic
southern European might veer toward the dilichocephalic Nordic norm in a
single generation of altered environment (Boas, 1911).' (Boas, F., 1899, The
cephalic index. American Anthropologist 1, 448-461. Boas, F., 1911, Changes
in the bodily form of descendents of immigrants. Senate Document 208, 61st
Congress, 2d Session.)

By 1950, things reached the point where John Lawrence Angel, the famous
anatomist and criminal forsenic scientist, refused to even include cranial
indexing in his report on the skeletal remains at Troy, writing "... the
discussion of these distinctions displays both the relative incompetence of
present metrical and observational methods to analyze thoroughly the genetic
relationships of different populations, and the need for the study of
combinations of traits which can be shown to depend on multiple effects of
single genes and chromosome linkage groups in order to clarify their
recombinations exposed now in a bewildering web of 'types'. " (J. Lawrence
Angel 1951. Troy, the Human Remains. Supplementary Monograph 1. Princeton.
p. 30)"

Among medical specialists, terms like dolichocephalic are now only used to
describe acute skeletal deformities, such as those resulting from
hypophosphatasia. The general consensus is that '... these morphological
characteristics can be influenced by the environmental or nutritive factors,
as well as by artificial manipulation' and therefore can consistently produce
highly unreliable data."

Steve