A study of non-metric (qualitative) variation in Gujarati crania

Abstract

Three hundred and seventy adult skulls (284 crania of unknown sex, 58 males and 28 females) from Gujarat State of India were examined for the incidence of non-metric variants and compared with other populations to establish the distance between them. In general the Gujarati incidences are of similar order to those in other series. The mean measures of divergence between Gujarati and other populations were all statistically significant (P less than 0.001). The Gujarati differed most from Australian Aborigines, but only slightly from the Burma, Punjab and Egypt samples. From the same material side and sex dimorphism was also tested to ascertain that how far sides and sexes can be pooled in Indian sample for making comparison between populations. In Gujarati population out of 22 cranial variants only four show sex difference and in case of bilateral traits, none of the variant has shown significant (P less than 0.05) side to side difference.