Cranial secular change from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in modern German individuals compared to modern Euro-American individuals

Abstract

Studying secular changes on human skulls is a central issue in anthropological research, which is however insufficiently investigated for modern German populations. With our study, we focus on morphological cranial variations within Germans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To study this, we recorded different facial landmarks from a cohort study of about 540 German individuals of different age and sex by calculating their cranial size, shape dimensions, and cranial module and cranial capacity to get information about variations occurring during the decades. According to this, measured variables for Germans and Americans, to which we compared our results, were maximum cranial length (glabello-occipital length), basion-bregma height (BBH), basion-nasion length (BNL), maximum cranial breadth (XCB), and cranial base breadth (AUB). Cranial size was calculated as the geometric mean of GOL, BBH, and XCB. Samples were organized into quarter century birth cohorts, with birth years ranging from 1800 to 1950. One-way ANOVA was used to test for variation among cohorts. Over the past 150 years, Americans and Germans showed significant parallel changes, but the American cranium remained relatively higher, with a longer cranial base, as well as narrower than the German cranium. Our results should also lead to the extension of the range of populations listed and investigated for Fordisc®, a forensic software to identify unknown individuals as from their skeletal remains or just parts of them. Fordisc cannot provide a satisfying identification of European individuals yet because the database is missing enough European reference samples.

Cranial capacity measurement for modern Chinese adults based on 3D reconstruction

“…These differences may be caused by the geographical regions, descent, genetic profile, and even different sample sizes of the different studies. 14,15 This finding provide data for establishing the reference value of normal Chinese adult cranial capacity.…”

Testing the accuracy of the SexEst software for sex estimation in a modern Greek sample

“…Research across the world has shown that over time, various skeletal dimensions have undergone significant changes (Langley & Jantz, 2020). For example, the cranium has been found to turn increasingly long, high, and narrow, with a longer cranial base from the 19th to the mid-20th century in a comparative study between Germans and Euro-Americans (Jellinghaus et al, 2018). Similarly, studies focused exclusively on North American cranial morphological changes from the mid-19th century to the 1970s found an elongation and narrowing of the cranial vault, as well as an increase in its height.…”