Forehead: low, receding Brow ridges: heavy Face and jaws: protruding Rear: protruding Forehead: narrow Vault: keeled Sides: flat Sockets: low, oblong Dolichocephalic (very long and narrow head)
NEGROID
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)
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.