_Forehead: low, rounded_
_Brow ridges: slight or absent_
_Face and jaws: rotruding_
_Rear: bulging_
_Forehead: narrow_
_Vault: curved_
_Sides: flat to slightly convex_
_Dolichocephalic (narrow head, medium to long)_
[Illustration: MONGOLOID]
_Forehead: somewhat high_
_Brow ridges: absent_
_Face: flat_
_Rear: flat_
_Forehead: broad_
_Vault: broad, globular_
_Sides: convex to bulging_
_Brachycephalic (round)_
What Skull Measurements Tell Us About Early Man
These peculiarities of southwest Pacific skulls are important if you are
looking for early man in the Americas. As we have said, a skull found
along with the bones of extinct mammals or in a geological formation
that suggests great age is almost always long-headed, or
dolichocephalic. The typical, round-headed Mongoloid Indian is
conspicuous by his antique absence. (The only early skulls that are not
long-headed fall in the intermediate division, the mesocephalic.)
Further, the early skull has most, if not all, of the following
features: a heavy, almost continuous brow ridge; a receding chin; a low
nose root; straight sides; a retreating forehead, and a keeled vault.
On the score of long-headedness, there can be no question about all but
two of the early skulls mentioned in Chapter 6 or illustrated on page
216. The Confins has a cephalic index of 69.1, which is
hyper-dolichocephalic, or extra long; the female skulls of the Pericú in
Lower California average 68.50 and the male 66.15, while sixteen skulls
from the Texas coast show an average of 65.37. Except for the skulls of
Tepexpan man and the Minnesota girl, all the other skulls we have
referred to have the same long-headed character. If those from Texas and
the Pacific Coast are not so ancient as the rest, at least they seem to
represent the descendants of an old strain forced off into marginal
areas by the invasion of newer peoples. To be sure, we have now—and have
had—Indians with long skulls, particularly in the eastern part of the
United States and to some extent on the Great Plains. But their number
is not large, and can never have been large, compared with the great
bulk of round-headed Indians of the two Americas.
[Illustration: EARLY MAN VS. THE MONGOLOID
_In this comparison, the Mongoloid skull—indicated by dotted
lines—and the skulls of early man are not drawn to true scale,
because the former is an abstraction, and the measurements of all
the latter are not available. For comparison, the nose root and the
back of the skull are made to agree in the profiles, and the other
views are drawn from this relationship._ (_The Mongoloid skull,
after Stibbe, 1938, and Hooton, 1931; the Early Sacramento, courtesy
Robert F. Heizer; the Pericú, after ten Kate, 1884, and Woodbury,
1935; the Punin, after Sullivan and Hellman, 1925; the Lagoa Santa,
after Hrdlička, 1912; the Central Texas, after Hooton, 1933.)_]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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