The present research focuses on craniofacial variation in Nubia over approximately 10,000 years. Samples were grouped according to their temporal location and subsistence pattern, and represent a transition from a hunting-gathering adaptation (Mesolithic) to a transitional hunting-gathering-agricultural adaptation (A-C Group) and finally to a fully agricultural adaptation (Meroitic/X-Group/Christian). The purposes were: (1) to compare the Mesolithic sample with the later Nubian populations; and (2) to evaluate further the hypothesis that change in Nubian craniofacial morphology was due to changing functional demands associated with the progressive change in subsistence adaptation and associated behavior. The results tend to support recent views that the Nubian Mesolithic population is probably ancestral to later Nubian groups, and that the masticatory-functional hypothesis can best account for craniofacial change among the Nubians since 12,000 B.P. According to this hypothesis systematic reduction in functional demand placed on the masticatory complex from the Mesolithic led, secondarily, to an alteration of the growth of the maxillomandibular complex such that the face became progressively less robust and more inferoposteriorly located relative to the cranial vault. Both the increase in the height of the vault relative to its length, producing a more "globular" appearance, and the reduction in dental size were tertiary, compensatory responses to altered facial size and position.

For the first half of the 20th century, biological anthropology stagnated in a state in which racial typology was its major theoretical and methodological focus. In 1951, Sherwood Wash burn proposed the "new physical anthropology" that would move biological anthropology beyond description. Washburn repositioned it into a science that focused on process, theory, and hypothesis testing. The commitment to a process-oriented biological anthropology has been slow, but there has been progress. Biocultural studies and functional anatomy have produced a more dynamic science characterized by hypothesis testing and a heightened concern for causality. Unfortunately, a return to historical particularism has limited progress. An increasing interest in forensic application and resurgent interest in measures of population distances and migrations represents a reversion to an earlier descriptive past.There is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again -Eugene O'Neill H UMAN SKELETONS REPRESENT ANSWERS, and the goal of osteology is to frame the questions. There are important questions that ancient skeletons will not answer, and there are unimportant questions that they will. The quest, of course, has always been to discover meaningful questions-questions central to knowledge and the human condition, solvable through the analysis of human skeletal remains. The search continues and the stakes are high. We are searching for nothing less than the identity of our science defined by that small space in which the possible meets the meaningful.The space, of course, is an ever changing landscape of possibilities. Osteologists once limited to simple techniques of counting and measurement are now armed with chemical assay techniques, imaging technology, and multivariate statistics programs for high-speed desktop computers. Studies of biological distance and multivariate morphometrics compete for journal space with neutron activation analyses and dietary reconstructions. New techniques have led to new questions and reconsideration of old ones. This volatile mix of old and new defines the contrasts, contradictions, and conflicts of our time, and this also leads to an important insight. Where we are today is very much a reflection of where we have been.It is interesting, then, that osteology, a science directed so much to the past, has often failed to reflect on its own. Put simply, an understanding of skeletal biology's history may help us evaluate the importance of the questions we ask and methods we apply today.Our interest follows in the tradition of earlier studies by Gabriel Lasker (1970) and C. Owen Lovejoy et al. (1982). Like them, we intend to explore the apparent disconnection between the questions asked and the techniques employed by contemporary osteologists. In our view, the promise of a "new physical anthropology," driven by the convergence of new methods applied to new questions, has failed to take solid hold in osteology. The discipline finds itself awash in new and increasingly sophisticated techniques a...

Previous analysis of cribra orbitalia in the medieval populations of Kulubnarti focused only on the presence or absence of the lesion relative to age, sex, and cultural period. Demographic consideration of the lesion was limited to a gross comparison of lesion frequencies and probabilities of dying by age group. The scope of the earlier work has been expanded in the present research to include the consideration of cribra orbitalia from a developmental, demographic, and diachronic perspective. The sample consisted of the same 334 crania analyzed by Van Gerven et al. ([1981] J. Hum. Evol. 10:395-408). All skulls showing the lesion were dichotomized as active or healing, and separate life tables were constructed for those with lesions and those without. The results demonstrate that active lesions are confined entirely to infancy and childhood with formation beginning as early as six months and ending by the twelfth year. This childhood pattern is consistent with the iron deficiency anemia hypothesis proposed by Carlson et al. ([1974] J. Hum. Evol. 3:405-410). Among young adults (16-40), healing lesions occur more frequently in males than females. In the older age categories, however, females exhibit a higher frequency of partially healed lesions than males. A life table comparison of those with and those without cribra orbitalia reveals a dramatic reduction in mean life expectancy for those with the lesion across the formative childhood years (birth-16). This reduction peaks at age 5 where 78% of the children exhibit lesions and where they, as a group, have a mean life expectancy 15.5 years below those without the lesion.

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