Dr. T. Tóth szerk.: Studia historico-anthropologica (Anthropologia Hungarica 20. Budapest, 1988)
ANTHROPOLOGIA HUNGARICA XX. 1988 p. 23-30 On the flatness of the facial skeleton in Men By T. TÓTH (Received November 18, 1987) Abstract. Having compared oecumenically the osteological remains from skeletalized populations the author outlines the problem of the development of facial flatness. With 4 tables. MATERIAL AND METHOD In the last decades an analysis of the morphological characters of the facial skeleton (e. g. flatness) was neglected by the majority of general craniological studies. This is true in the case of series originating from different millennia, too, excepting northern Eurasia (where the evaluation of the horizontal face profile has been for decades a part of the craniological programmes). The systematical analysis of the human cranium concerning particularly the morphological configuration of the maxillonasal region has started on the basis of two classical studies (WOO & MORANT 1934; ABINDER 1960) on more than seven thousand human crania excavated in the territory of North Eurasia (DEBETS 1951, 1961a, b). The flatness, as a taxonomical trait, has been diagnosed according to alternative conceptions. In contradiction to DEBETS (1951, 1961a, b) the flatness has not been considered by some authors as a manifestation of mongoloidism, because this character - in spite of its becoming a stable one on the Asian continent during the millennia of the geological Holocene - was clearly manifested in the values of the nasomalar angle of the European populations, too, which lived in the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods (YAKIMOV 1957, 1960, 1961; ALEKSEEV 1978, 1979, 1983; GOHMAN 1966, 1986). For expressing the mutual relation existing between the nasomalar and zygomaxillar angles YAKIMOV (1960) and TSUI CHEN YAO (1960) proposed the platyprosopy index - Zm: 77%. In this connection the analysis of recent craniological finds from South-African bushmen deserves a special attention. In the first craniological synthesis of World's people HOWELLS (1973) gives a summarized documentation by using the data of the bushman osteological remains deposited in different collections (Vienna, Cape Town, New York, Johannesburg, Paris, Edinburgh and Oxford). In July 1981 the present author had the opportunity to study recent craniological finds of bushman in the Institute of Human Biology of the Vienna University as well as in the Natural History Museum of Vienna. The Osteometrie characteristics of 101 adult individuals (48 males, 53 females from the Pöchcollection) were formerly analysed by PACHER (1961) according to traditional programme and she drew our attention to the possibility of a metisation. In accordance with this the present author has collected a number of metric data of flatness from the finds of the presumably "bushman" group (12 males, 16 females) (Table 1). In the evaluation of the lineal and angle values of the horizontal profile and nasal region the categories calculated by DEBETS have been used (ALEKSEEV & DEBETS 1964; Table 4 in the present paper). The curvature index (S:C) of os malare was determined on the crania of the bushman group with WOO' s
