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385-401, 1995 Nonmetric Cranial Variation of Northeast Asians And Anthropol. Sci. 103(4), 385-401, 1995 Nonmetric Cranial Variation of Northeast Asians and Their Population Affinities HAJIME ISHIDA Department of Anatomy, Sapporo Medical University School of Medicine, S-1, W-17, Chuo-ku, Sapporo 060, Japan Received May 1, 1995 •ôGH•ô Abstract•ôGS•ô A comparative study of nonmetric cranial variation revealed popula tionaffinities between the Northeast and East Asians. The recent eastern Siberian populations were basically divided into the three groups defined by Debets (1951), though the Baikal group peoples, consisting of the Amur, Evenki and Yukagir, do not cluster together. The Yukagir remain intermediate between the Baikal and Central Asian groups, while the Evenki are isolated from other Siberians, probably because of their small sample size. The Neolithic Baikalian are close to the Amur peoples, while the Troitskoe of the Mo-ho culture from the Amur basin show some close affinities with the Central Asian group. Because the Central Asian group peoples are more similar to the Northern Chinese than to the Neolithic Baikalian, the former two seem likely to have interacted with each other since the Neolithic age. The Hokkaido Ainu show no close affinity with the Neolithic or the later Siberian Mongoloids, nor with the Europeans. •ôGH•ô Key Words•ôGS•ô: cranium, nonmetric cranial variation, Siberians, Ainu INTRODUCTION Russian anthropologists have written the most significant of the studies on the prehistoric and historic Siberian populations. Many craniological and somatological data have been published in the Russian journals to shed light on their origins, differentiations and migrations (e.g., Debets, 1951). American physical anthropolo gists,especially since Ales Hrdlicka, have also been interested in the human skeletal remains from Siberia, as those would be key evidence of Asian-American connec tions(Hrdlicka, 1942). Laughlin, Turner, Ossenberg and Haeussler investigated cranial and dental traits of the Siberian populations, resulting in various hypotheses on prehistoric dispersal of the Northern Mongoloids (Laughlin et al., 1976; Ossenberg, 1986; Turner, 1987; Haeussler and Turner, 1992). The Ainu have lived in Hokkaido, one of the Japan Islands, in Sakhalin and in the Kurile Islands, situated off the east coast of the Asian continent. The origins and affiliation of the Ainu have long evoked interest for physical anthropologists in Japan, Russia and other countries, due to their physical peculiarity (Koganei, 1893; Trofimova, 1932; Kiyono, 1949). It is generally agreed that the Ainu are different in morphology from the Neolithic and later Siberian or East Asian 386 H. ISHIDA populations (Turner, 1987; Yamaguchi, 1982). The people of the prehistoric Okhotsk culture appeared in the Sakhalin, northern Hokkaido and the Kurile Islands during the 5th to 12th century A.D.(Kikuchi, 1978). They show many characteristics in common not with the Ainu, but with the Northern Mongoloids (Yamaguchi, 1974; Ishida, 1988; Kozintsev, 1992). That stirred interest in the physical anthropology of the Siberian populations. We have investigated the cranial traits of the Siberian and other popu lations(Ishida, 1990, 1993; Ishida and Kida, 1991; Ishida and Dodo, 1992, 1995). The nonmetric cranial variations of the Siberian populations were examined by Rychikov and Movsesyan (1972) and Kozintsev (1980). However, Kozintsev had doubts about the efficacy of classification by the nonmetric cranial variations used. He subsequently developed his own cranioscopic traits to investigate affinities between the Siberian and neighbor populations (Kozintsev, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1993). In Japan, Yamaguchi (1967) and Dodo (1974, 1986) have studied the nonmetric cranial variations of the circum-Pacific populations. We have reported the differentiations and affiliations of the Siberian populations using nonmetric cranial variations (Ishida and Dodo, 1992, 1995; Ishida and Kojima, n.d.). In this study, I have attempted to infer the populational affinities between the Northeast Asians, including the Siberians, through analysis of the nonmetric cranial trait data, which I have collected in many institutions up to the present. MATERIALS AND METHODS The cranial samples collected in the former Soviet Union and the USA were the Aleut, Asian Eskimo, Chukchi, Ekven (the Iron Age), Buryat, Evenki, Yakut, Yukagir, Neolithic Baikalian, Mongolian, Tagar (the Iron age), Kazakh, Amur, Troitskoe (Mo-ho culture), Russian, and Sakhalin Ainu (Fig. 1). Those cranial collections are housed in the Institute of Ethnography-St. Petersburg Branch; the Museum of Anthropology of Moscow State University; the Institute of Ethnography and Archaeology, Novosibirsk; Irkutsk State University, Irkutsk; and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. The Amur sample consisted of the Ulch, Nanay, Negidal and Oroch. The cranial materials of the Hokkaido Ainu, Sakhalin Ainu and Northern Chinese (Han) are stored in the University of Tokyo, and Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. The crania of the Hokkaido and Sakhalin Ainu were mainly collected by Koganei (1893) and Kiyono (1949), respectively. To summarize the locations of origin of the samples: The Neolithic Baikalians were excavated on both the east and west coasts of Lake Baikal. The Troitskoe site was in the Amur basin (Alekseev, 1980). The Ekven skeletal materials are from an ancient Eskimo cemetery (Debets, 1975). The Tagar culture thrived from the 7th to the 3rd century B.C. in southern Siberia and their crania show many Caucasian characteristics (Kozintsev, 1977). The cranial materials of the recent times from Nonmetric Cranial Variation of Northeast Asians 387 Fig. 1. Location of 15 Northeast Asian and other Eurasian populations. Siberia have been reported by the Russian researchers (Debets, 1951; Alekseev, 1964a, b; Tomtosova, 1974). The cranial materials of the Northern Chinese (Han) are derived from Liaoning Province, China. The crania of the Hokkaido Ainu are from various sites in Hokkaido (Koganei, 1893; Yamaguchi, 1973). In order to eliminate interobserver error, the author alone scored all the 22 nonmetric cranial traits used in this study as present or absent for all the series consisting of 1,835 crania, following the criteria of Dodo (1974, 1986). The 22 nonmetric cranial traits are metopism, supraorbital nerve groove, supraorbital foramen, ossicle at the lambda, biasterionic suture, asterionic bone, occipito-mastoid wormians, parietal notch bone, condylar canal patent, precondylar tubercle, paracondylar process, hypoglossal canal bridging, tympanic dehiscence, ovale -spinosum confluence, foramen of Vesalius, pterygo-spinous foramen, medial palatine canal, transverse zygomatic-suture vestige, clinoid bridging, mylohyoid bridging, jugular foramen bridging and sagittal sinus groove flexes left. Our researches on Japanese and Siberian peoples have shown that this battery of nonmetric cranial traits is fairly resistant to environmental stresses (Dodo and Ishida, 1990, 1992; Ishida, 1990). 388 H. ISHIDA In those studies we estimated the biological distances using nonmetric traits by C.A.B. Smith's mean measure of divergence (Sjovold, 1973); however, that criterion did not remove distortion by the intertrait correlations. Recently, Konigsberg (1990) invented another biological distance which extends the method of Mahalanobis' distances to cover nonmetric traits using the tetrachoric correlation matrix. The biological distances between the 22 Siberian and East Asian populations were estimated by Konigsberg's method, based on 22 nonmetric cranial traits. The computer program which was provided by Konigsberg was extended for use on a Unix operating system. Principal coodinate analysis was applied to the distance matrix to represent two - dimensional relationships between the samples (Sneath and Sokal, 1973). The neighbor-joining method (Saitou and Nei, 1987) was also carried out on the basis of the distance matrix. RESULTS Table 1 shows the incidences of the 22 nonmetric cranial traits per capita in the 18 populations from the Siberian and East Asian regions. Table 1. Incidencesper capita of 22 nonmetriccranial traits in the Siberianand East Asian series Nonmetric Cranial Variation of Northeast Asians 389 Table 1. (cont'd) Incidences per capita of 22 nonmetric cranial traits in the Siberian and East Asian series Dodo and Ishida (1990) selected the following five nonmetric traits as the most efficacious for distinguishing between the Jomon-Ainu and other Japanese populations in question: the supraorbital foramen, hypoglossal canal bridging, medial palatine canal, transverse zygomatic-suture vestige and mylohyoid bridging. These are graphically compared between the six samples (Fig. 2). The frequency of the supraorbital foramen in the Hokkaido Ainu (0.283) is considerably lower than in the other four Asian samples and is comparable to that in the Russian; conversely, the frequencies of transverse zygomatic-suture vestige and medial palatine canal are higher than in the Russian and four Asians. As for hypoglossal canal bridging and mylohyoid bridging, the Amur, Mongolian and Northern Chinese have lower incidences than the Hokkaido Ainu and the Eskimo samples. The frequency of the hypoglossal canal bridging in the Russian is high as in the Ainu an Eskimo, though the frequency of the mylohyoid bridging is lower. The frequency patterns of the five traits suggest that the six ethnic samples are divided into the following four groups: the Hokkaido Ainu; the Asian Eskimo; the Amur, Mongolian and Northern
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