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.
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.)
LAGOA SANTA Brazil Av. cephalic index 70.5 PUNIN Ecuador Cephalic index 71 MELBOURNE Florida Cephalic index 73.1 PERICU Lower California Cephalic index 65.62 CENTRAL TEXAS Jones County Cephalic Index 60.71 EARLY SACRAMENTO California Cephalic Index 72.5
Apart from long-headedness, our early skulls share a number of other peculiarities of the Australoid-Melanesian: the quite heavy brow ridges, the keeled vault, the straight sides, the retreating forehead, the low nose root, and the receding chin. Some have the round vault and the fuller forehead of White and Mongoloid peoples, but these are also a feature of the Negrito strain that united with the Australoid in Melanesia.
In one respect only do the skulls of early American man follow a Mongoloid pattern: almost all have prominent cheekbones. We must remember, however, that prominent cheekbones are found in other races—though not so commonly—and we must recognize that they cannot weigh too heavily against those un-Mongoloid peculiarities we have dwelt on.
The peculiarities of our early skulls must make us think twice about the Indian as the only pre-Columbian inhabitant of the Americas south of the Eskimo. They bear witness to another invader from the Old World. Such skulls—even if they were only a thousand years old—would tell us that the typical Mongoloid Indian was not the only arrival from Asia who left descendants. Since many of the skulls are definitely the oldest that have been found in the New World, we must recognize that early man bore some relationship to other peoples than the forebears of the noble red man.