Frequency of Skulls with Lambdoidal Suture Wormian Bones in Two English Historical Ossuaries

Abstract

Wormian or sutural bones vary in number, size, and arrangement in humans, and are thus sometimes described as “odd”. Currently, there are not reliable data to estimate the frequency at which they are found. Some anthropologists have attempted to assess Wormian bone frequency in different, mostly non‐European human populations hoping to find whether there are differences among peoples of different genetic lineage. However, the sample sizes in these studies are too small to be able to compare such highly variable structures. Wormian bone incidence in skulls in the Paris Catacombs (les catacombes de Paris) [Schmeidler, 2018] and in three Italian anthropological collections [Schmeidler, 2019] have been previously presented, demonstrating Wormian bone occurrence in about 78% of 1100 skulls examined. This contrasts with most published studies that report incidences in the 10–20% range. The Parisian and Italian collections represent European populations, presumably from recent centuries, circa 1700–1900 C.E. These studies have been extended to analysis of mostly medieval, presumed to be mostly circa 1300–1400 C.E. skulls in the only two known extant English church ossuaries, at Hythe and Rothwell. The incidence of Wormian bones in the lambdoidal suture at these two sites is consistent with the other, more recent western European sites in this series. The photographic evidence collected in this project may be used to support further research in human anatomical variation. These findings expand the data set for comparison of Wormian bones from different parts of Europe and to peoples from other regions of the world, serving the greater community by providing a baseline against which smaller sample groups may be compared.