• Question: How do you tell the difference between a human skull and the skulls of 'homosaepiens'? I mean, people do have a big range of differenet looking skulls so you must have some kind of way to differenciate.

    Asked by bakti to Ed, Katie, Sam, Steve, Vera on 20 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by lc22.
    • Photo: Steven Daly

      Steven Daly answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Homo Sapiens is the latin name for Humans, so I am not quite sure what you mean here.

    • Photo: Vera Weisbecker

      Vera Weisbecker answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I think your question is how we can tell the skulls of different human species apart, right? So, human skulls can be quite different from each other but the skulls of other human species are even more different. So you can, say, look at how big the eyebrow ridges are. They can be big or small in humans, but in things like Neanderthals, they are absolutely huge compared to all humans!

    • Photo: Katie Marriott

      Katie Marriott answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I don’t know but a good answer from Vera there!

    • Photo: Sam Tazzyman

      Sam Tazzyman answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      This is a good example of a wider problem, namely how can we tell apart the variation within a group compared to the variation between groups. Another example would be how can we tell an orange apart from an apples, when there is a lot of variation between different oranges? The answer is that the average difference between two oranges is less than the average difference between an apple and an orange. And it’s the same with skulls: on average, two Homo sapiens skulls are more similar than a Homo sapiens skull and a Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal) skull.

Comments

  • Photo: Anna

    Anna commented on :

    Hi Bakti,
    I’m a forensic anthropologist, and one of the things we try and do is look at skulls of skeletons and try and work out where in the world they came from, or their ethnic ancestry. There tends to be a lot of variation in the facial skeleton of people from all over the world, and we can use this to help us differentiate between populations. We do this by taking over 40 different measurements of the skulls, in all different planes, and then comparing them to reference data collected by anthropologists over the years from known populations. We can also look for ‘non-metric’ traits – ie little features that may or not be present, and general facial shapes. For example, GENERALLY speaking, people from European countries and cooler climates have narrow nasal openings and not very protruding cheekbones. In contrast, people with African origin tend to have wider nasal openings and exhibit prognathism (their top and bottom jaw stick out a little bit), and people from the Far East tend to have more protruding cheekbones, and can have ‘shovel shaped’ insicors, where their front teeth are slightly concave on their back (facing the tongue) surface. Of course, these are all generalisations, but people often fit broadly into these facial skeleton types. We can also tell if someone is Aborigine or Native American too, from their facial skeleton.
    For police investigations, we can usually tell the police something about the likely ethnic ancestry of the skeleton, but we can’t tell them which culture/social group they identified with, as that is not left on the skeleton.
    If you have any more, similar questions, I’m in the Forensic zone!