Integrated Study of Human Skeletal Non-metric Characters, with Special Reference to Their Heritabilities

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We, the study group of human skeletal non-metric characters, have collaborated to facilitate the use of those characters in such fields as physical anthropology, archaeology and systematics. In this research term, we were especially concerned with studying some genetic aspects of those characters from quite diversified perspectives, and through three times of symposia, discussed some methodological problems for the standardisation of recording such sort of cherecters and the application to human biological and archeological studies. The main results obtained are as follows: 1. The statistic analysis of auditory exostosis frequencies revealed an intriguing geographic variation among Jomon people, and suggested that a cold aquatic stimulus can be considered as a major causative factor of manifesting the trait also in Jomon people and that the multifactorial inheritance model should be applicable to analyse it. 2. As to a majority of non-metric cranial characters, which have been very pop … More ular in population comparison, their frequencies proved to have drastically changed between the Jomon and Yayoi people, but have not substantially changed from the Yayoi through modern Japanase. Such evidence should be interpreted as coming from the fact that those characters are more heritable than metric skeletal characters. 3. Both the methods of positioning an individual skeleton into some group, and of estimating consanguinity among individuals, were proposed using non-metric cranial characters, and proved very successful when being applied to some archaeological cases. 4. Non-metric characters on the cranium, post-cranial skeleton, palatine and tooth crown have been reasonably evaluated their heritabilities through analising pedigree data and those from twins and relatives. 5. A new method has been proposed in terms of population genetics to estimate the heritability coefficient of non-metric variants and to expect the incidences of them in human populations that two groups mixed, based on the multi-factorial inheritance model thresholds. 6. The incidences of non-metric skeletal characters in an isolated human population, was successfully analysed in terms of population genetics. 7. Non-metric cranial characters were applied also to study the biological affinity of non-human primates, specifically of Japanese macaques, and it proved very promissing. Less