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With phrenology falling out of vogue in the Occident, it is not at all easy to get a large dataset on human cranial volumes purely for research on the internet. One famous collection is that of the early American phrenologist Morton of 1225 crania of various peoples of the world
Morton, called by many to be a racist, was accused of inflating the volumes of the "white Caucasian" (or deflating that of others) by the Marxist scientist SJ Gould. While Morton had beliefs typical of Euro-ancestry Americans of the age (early 1800s), reexamination of his records
shows no evidence for fudging of the data. There are different methods for cranial volumetry: Morton used two alternatives. Initially, he filled the skulls with pepper seeds and measured out their volume. Then he used lead pellets. His contemporary, a German Tiedemann who amassed
his own cranial collection (*not* called a racist) filled skulls with millet seeds and weighed them rather than taking the volume -- this is problematic for we do not have his seed density for converting to volume. Others have performed volumetry by filling skulls with water
More recently, people can do computerized volumetry from scans but such data is hard to easily access. The volumes of course differ by each method a bit but are mostly consistent. We have a dataset of 460 of Morton's crania. The most voluminous skull in his collection was a
big-headed Dutch chap with 1786 cc. With phrenology falling out of favor in the Occident the Morton collection which was once allowed for free public viewing was gradually made more &more inaccessible. Unfortunately, after the American upheaval of summer 2020 it was made entirely
taken out of public view & the skulls of individuals of certain ethnicities might be physically buried. A 1946 English phrenological study found a fellow with a 1800 cc skull. In India phrenology continued after the initial influences of the likes of the statistician R. Fisher&
his H successors more or less in the old style of the Euro-american founders. One report mentioned a 1709 cc maximal volume. However, we have not yet found any- published report with something bigger than that. From the recent Indian data assuming normal distribution it seem a
1/100 Indian males might have a cranial volume of 1700 cc or greater. An American survey in the 1970s suggests that 1/126 individuals (sex data not available to me) might have a 1700 cc or greater volume. Hence, it does seem that East Asian archaic Homo possibly Denisovan had
unusually large cranial volumes by modern Homo standards
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