169-181, 2000 Tooth Size of People in Wabag, Papua New Guinea
Anthropological Science 108 (2), 169-181, 2000 Tooth Size of People in Wabag, Papua New Guinea Highlanders and its Comparison with Pacific Peoples Eisaku Kanazawa, Masanobu Matsuno, Hideyuki Sekiguchi, Takanobu Suzuki, Takashi Satake, Kayoko Sasaki, and Yuriko Igarashi Department of Anatomy, Nihon University School of Dentistry at Matsudo, Matsudo (Submitted January 20, 2000; Review sent February 10, 2000; Accepted April 23, 2000) •ôGH•ô Abstract•ôGS•ô Dental casts were recently collected from Highlanders in Kasi Village of Wabag in Enga Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Mean age of subjects was 19.2 years ranged from 16 to 44. The mesiodistal and buccolingual diameters of all upper and lower teeth (except third molars) were measured. Sex differences of these diameters were relatively large in this population compared with other Pacific populations. The results were compared with previous reports of Asian Pacific populations including some Highland groups of PNG by cluster analysis and multi-dimensional scaling from Mahalanobis' distances, Q-mode correlation coefficients and Penrose's size distances. In the Mahalanobis' distances, Wabag was clustered in the groups of Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals. In the analysis of the distances transformed from Q-mode correlation coefficients, Wabag was also clustered with these groups, but Fiji was clustered in Polynesians and Micronesians. In the Penrose's size distances, Wabag teeth were smaller than other Highlanders such as Goroka and Lufa, but were close to Polynesians. This suggested that tooth size varied in a Highlander groups in PNG and that there were marked polymorphism of Melanesians. •ôGS•ô Keywords•ôNS•ô: Papua New Guinea, Highlanders, dental anthropology, tooth size Introduction Dental anthropological survey at Kasi village, Wabag in Enga Province of Papaua New Guinea (PNG) was carried out by Nihon University Dental Survey Team in the summer of 1997.
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