Size and shape differences among six South American Indian tribes

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Measurements of height, face height, nose height, nose breadth, head length and head breadth from individuals living in 17 villages of 6 South American Indian tribes were compared using Mahalanobis''s morphological distances (D) and their partition into size and shape components. Total D2 values correlate well with estimates of linguistic differentiation, but not with geographic distances between tribes. Of the 6 tribes, 3 were also studied for blood polymorphisms, and again measures of distances based on these hematological traits did not correlate well with the morphological ones. The shape component was about 3 times as important as size in contributing to the intertribal variation.