Cranial Growth in the prehistoric sample from K2 at Mapungubwe (South Africa) is population specific

Abstract

Although studies on long bone growth from archaeological remains are fairly common, much less has been published on cranial growth from the same kind of data. Differences in adult cranial morphology are often used to distinguish between various populations, and most obviously these differences must have been formed sometime during childhood. Using the juvenile skeletons from the prehistoric sample from K2 (South Africa) as an example, this study demonstrates that some of the characteristic adult morphological dimensions of the skull are distinguishable from as early as five years of age. Some of these characteristics show clearer patterns than others in the various populations compared in this study, and they correlate with those measurements in the literature which are described as being strongly heritable. The dimension which seems to be the most characteristic for a particular population, is that of cranial breadth. Small sample sizes were, however, a problem and these results need to be confirmed on other, larger samples.