Brief communication

Artificial cranial modification in K ow S wamp and C ohuna

Bibliographic Data

ID8316181
AuthorsArthur C Durband (Department of Sociology Anthropology, and Social Work, Texas Tech University Lubbock TX, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume155
Issue1
Pages173-178
Publication date2014-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-9483 • E-ISSN: 1096-8644
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/ajpa.22563
PMID24964764
OpenAlexW1930458678
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited17

The crania from Kow Swamp and Cohuna have been important for a number of debates in Australian paleoanthropology. These crania typically have long, flat foreheads that many workers have cited as evidence of genetic continuity with archaic Indonesian populations, particularly the Ngandong sample. Other scientists have alleged that at least some of the crania from Kow Swamp and the Cohuna skull have been altered through artificial modification, and that the flat foreheads possessed by these individuals are not phylogenetically informative. In this study, several Kow Swamp crania and Cohuna are compared to known modified and unmodified comparative samples. Canonical variates analyses and Mahalanobis distances are generated, and random expectation statistics are used to calculate statistical significance for these tests. The results of this study agree with prior work indicating that a portion of this sample shows evidence for artificial modification of the cranial vault. Many Kow Swamp crania and Cohuna display shape similarities with a population of known modified individuals from New Britain. Kow Swamp 1, 5, and Cohuna show the strongest evidence for modification, but other individuals from this sample also show evidence of culturally manipulated changes in cranial shape. This project provides added support for the argument that at least some Pleistocene Australian groups were practicing artificial cranial modification, and suggests that caution should be used when including these individuals in phylogenetic studies. Am J Phys Anthropol 155:173–178, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Archaeology · Biology · Crania · Evolutionary biology · Geography · Population · Sociology · Swamp · Zoology · Craniofacial Disorders and Treatments · Demography · Ecology · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub