Acta Anthropologica Sinica ›› 1993, Vol. 12 ›› Issue (04): 327-336.

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Racial characteristics of the human skulls from the Bronze Age Site of Jiuquan County, Gansu

Zheng Xiaoying   

  • Online:1993-12-15 Published:1993-12-15

Abstract: In this paper the racial charactcristics of the human skulls from Ganguya cemetery, Jiuquan county, Gansu province excavatcd in 1987, were studied using multivariate analysis.According to l4C dating the age of these cemetery falls between 840 to 1600 B.P.. Principal components analysis, factor analysis, and the Q-type hierarchical clustering method were all used in this study, The results produced by these three techniques are quite consistent.
1. The Ganguya group was more closely related to the Mongoloid than to either the Caucasian and Australoids. Therefore, there is no doubt that the Bronze Age inhabitants of Ganguya belonged to the Mongoloid.
2. The Bronze Age inhabitants of Ganguya possessed larger orbital height, nasal height,upper facial height and basibregmatic height, and combining these with some important cranio-facial traits such as maximum cranial length. These traits are more closely related to the East Asian type of Mongoloid than to the North Asian type.
3. R-type factor analysis and Q-type hierarchical clustering suggest that the Ganguya group may be closely related to the Ha-mi group(in Xinjiang). We need to study this problem further.

Key words: Skulls; Racial characteristics; Multivariate analysis; Bronze Age; Ganguya