Researchers at other Neolithic sites in the Near East have often surmised that skulls and crania were acquired in this manner (e.
Kuijt (2000, 2001, 2008) and Goring-Morris (2000), for example, have argued that the circulation of crania or skulls and other secondary funerary treatments helped to maintain social cohesion and relieve societal tensions within Neolithic communities through collective ritual practices and the creation of shared social memory.
The removal of a femur, the longest bone in the human body, would have displaced the three crania, the pelvic bones, and many other bones, yet no evidence of such disturbance was found.
The total number of bones recovered from the site is 79 (Table 1) representing a minimum of three individuals, based on the presence of three crania and three right humeri, radii, and ulnae.
1) crania of macerated dead humans received by the institutions mentioned before,
2) crania belonging to the late 19th century till death as per records,
While under ideal circumstances the covariance matrix should reflect variation similar to that of the subjects under examination, this is clearly impossible in the case of fossil crania.
Although the measurements in their raw form may be moderately to highly correlated, the approach used here insures that only the independent information of each variable contributes to the Mahalanobis distance, at least to the extent that the modern covariance matrix applies to the ancient crania.
Using the sex estimates made by the authors at the time of examination as Sex Known and classifying the
crania by race within the specific sex category using the Forensic Data Bank option, the greatest percentage classified this time into the black category.
The pattern of damage to ET 5301--the loss of the face, all or part of both horn cores, and most of the minor prominences on other parts of the cranium, in conjunction with relatively large missing chips of bone--is consistent with patterns of damage seen in male
crania of Bootherium bombifrons that have been recovered from coarse fluvial sediments and are presumed to have been damaged by abrasion in high-energy fluvial currents.
In total, the remains of 12 hominin
crania (Solo I-XI; Solo III was later found to represent two individuals; Koenigswald [1951: 215]) as well as two tibiae were recovered; seven of the individuals were regarded as adult, of which two were male, two female, and the rest, indeterminate (Day 1986: 359).
In line with the multiregional origins theory, the fossil
crania of European H.
