U.S.-China Cooperative Research: Craniofacial Form in Relation to Prehistoric and Modern Populations in Asia

拟议的合作项目的目标是测试中国各地史前和现代人口之间的形态关系。其目的是要了解在特定地区的现代中国人与新石器时代的先民在中国的同一地区和其他地区的不同，其头面部形态是否有相同的差异--或更大或更小的程度。与中国地区人口迁徙的历史和考古记录相协调，与以前收集的过去和现在欧洲人口的数据进行比较，并从美洲印第安人样本收集数据的角度考虑，这应该为测量非适应性形态随时间变化的速率提供一个标尺。最终，这将使研究人员能够说出智人主要地区种群之间的各种差异需要多长时间才能形成。该项目涉及与藏品所在的中国考古研究所合作。这种合作对该项目的成功至关重要，并可能产生一种更长期的合作方式，以研究美国科学家基本上无法获得的其他中国收藏品。

The objective of the proposed cooperative project is to test the morphological relationships between the prehistoric and modern populations in the various parts of China. The intent is to see whether the craniofacial morphology of regionally identified modern Chinese populations differs to the same -- or to a greater or lesser -- degree as modern Chinese in a given area differ from their Neolithic antecedents in the same as well as in other parts of China. Coordinated with the historical and archaeological record of population movements from one part of China to another, compared with previously collected data from past and present European populations, and considered in the perspective of data to be gathered on Amerindian samples, this should give a scale for measuring the rate of non-adaptive morphological change through time. Ultimately this will allow the investigators to say just how long it has taken for the various differences between the major regional populations of Homo sapiens to have developed. This project involves collaboration with the Chinese Institute of Archaeology where the collections are housed. This collaboration is critical to the success of the project and could yield a longer term collaborative approach to studying other Chinese collections which have been largely unavailable to US scientists.