Cranial morphology (human)

Abstract

Human cranial morphology, the study of the size and shape of the human skull, has a long history in biological anthropology, with applications to the subfields of paleoanthropology, bioarchaeology, and forensic anthropology. These subfields have evolved from descriptive and historical sciences, preoccupied with racial classification, to studies based on modern evolutionary principles using advanced quantitative methods. Two main classes of cranial morphology (or variation) include cranial measurements (craniometry) and cranial nonmetric traits. The demonstration of a genetic component and the selective neutrality for both categories of variation have made them ideal for investigating biological relationships of past groups (biodistance studies) and a broad array of research questions in bioarchaeology, paleoanthropology, and forensic case work. The two main methods for recording cranial size and shape are traditional caliper‐based measurements and more recent coordinate landmark data used in geometric morphometrics (GM). Multivariate statistical procedures, such as stepwise discriminant function (canonical) analysis and Mahalanobis distance, are used to analyze craniometric data. GM methods are used to analyze coordinate data. The mean measure of divergence (MMD) statistic is used to analyze cranial nonmetric data in biological distance studies. Model‐free and model‐bound approaches are used for investigating the history and structure of past populations.