Africa, Southern -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Africa, Southern
In none of these six skulls is the patency of the frontal suture,
which corresponds very usually to a wide receptacle for the frontal
lobes of the brain, observable. On the other hand, the zygomata do
not come into view, when the skull is held out so as to present its
norma verticalis at arm’s length to one eye of the observer, with the
invariability which might have been expected. In two only of these
six skulls are both zygomata seen at the same time when the skull is
held in this position; in three the zygoma of the left side only is
seen; and in one neither zygoma comes into view. But these skulls,
as is often the case in skulls of flesh-eating savage races, are of
considerable density, and a greater thickness of walls as well as a
greater development of the contents of a skull may prevent it from
being phœnozygous. One other condition indeed, that of considerable
development of the malar arch, which produces phœnozygy, is present in
Bushmen, as in the skulls of other races exposed to the sun and glare,
and other irritants of the eyes; but its working is countervailed
by that of thickness of the cranial walls. All the Bushman skulls
examined by Dr. Fritsch were broad in the sphenoparietal diameter (see
his _Die Eingeborenen Süd-Afrika’s_, 1872, p. 413). With two
exceptions, those constituted by the skull procured by Mr. Fairclough
and that presented by Dr. Bleek, the supraciliary ridges and glabellæ
are comparatively feebly developed.
The parietal tubera, or the spots on the external surface of the
cranium corresponding to them, are placed far back in all these
crania, and what I have elsewhere spoken of at some length[72] as the
antero-posterior index, is consequently high. The same remark, however,
may be made of Zulu and other Abantu crania.
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