Two hundred and sixty-three Indians aged six and above were studied in Oklahoma for blood types, hemoglobin types, and physical traits; 53% were Seminoles and the remainder were admixed with Creek or other populations. The results indicate that they resemble the Florida Seminoles in most of their serologic traits. In physical traits they are comparable to the group studied by Krogman two decades ago. Compared with the Florida Seminoles, the Oklahoma sample are slightly taller and heavier, significantly lighter in skin color, and have a lower incidence of sickle cell gene. By both serology and morphology the Oklahoma group are most similar to Florida Seminoles, slightly less similar to other Indian groups, and still less to White and Negro populations. The Oklahoma sample of women showed a non-significantly greater fertility than those of Florida. Some indication of positive assortative mating for skin color was found in both groups.

The Seminole Indians of Oklahoma: Morphology and serology

THE only direct evidence for evolutionary changes in American Indians since they peopled the New World lies in their archeologically documented skeletal remains. The best cases for such evolutionary changes are in those New World areas with good indications of physical and cultural continuities spanning a number of millennia. The areas best fulfilling these requirements are the Eastern United States, the Pueblo area and Sacramento Valley regions of the West, the Valley of Mexico and Highland Guatemala, and portions of western South America. In other areas, such as the North American Plains and eastern South America, there are few signs of population continuities. Accordingly, any changes in skeletal morphology in such areas are best explained by the evolutionary factor of migration where strong gene flow approximated population replacement. Yet where population continuities are strong, gene flow from the outside need not be reckoned with as a major factor of evolutionary change. Within population continuities, significant long-term morphological trends are most readily interpreted as due to selection engendered by environmental pressures. Whether selection operates upon the morphological character itself, or its genetically-based range of plasticity alteration, as Hulse (1960:68) has suggested, the change is still evolutionary in that it involves gene frequency changes within the population. While plasticity responses of the sort seen in the descendants of immigrants to new lands (see Kaplan 1954) can blunt the effect of selective change by rendering it less necessary, plasticity and selection may also operate in concert-especially when environmental pressures are great. Within those New World areas with the best demonstrable continuities in population, the morphological traits affording the most ready comparison of skeletal remains to the living are: 1) body size as indicated by estimates of stature from long bones and the measured stature of the living; and 2) head form as determined by the indicial relationships of lengths and breadths of skulls and living heads. The trends in body size provide the evolutionary background for the regular and climatically controlled size gradients so clearly seen in distribution maps for the living (M. T. Newman 1953). In the same

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/aa.1962.64.2.02a00010

Evolutionary Changes in Body Size and Head Form in American Indians

Between 1938 and 1955, the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems (C.I.S.P.), headed by the world-renowned statistician and demographer Corrado Gini, organized a number of field expeditions in order to empirically verify the influence of the environment on the bodily changes of immigrants (Albanian and Ligurian ‘colonies’ in Italy, and Italians in the U.S.). Based on original archival sources, this article analyses, first, how the C.I.S.P. organized the demographic, anthropological and medical investigations on the physical assimilation of immigrants, by adopting a specific research model inaugurated in 1911 by American anthropologist Franz Boas; secondly, it shows how C.I.S.P. research was conceived, from the very beginning, as a fundamental contribution to the elaboration of an alternative, ‘Latin’ eugenic agenda as well as a form of critical distancing from the launch of the ‘Race Manifesto’, in July 1938.

In the shadow of Franz Boas: the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems and the physical assimilation of immigrants (1938–1955)

A complex morphological description based on a wide range of somatic features (30 characteristics) is presented for two modern indigenous ethnic groups of Indonesia: Minahasans (N = 93) and Sangirese (N = 76). These groups have not yet been extensively described in scientific publications from the standpoint of physical anthropology. To collect the data used in the research, the authors organized an anthropological expedition to the islands of Indonesia, Sulawesi, and Sangir. The examination program included the assessment of skin and iris pigmentation, estimation of hair shape and color, and measurements of body and limbs. It was shown that the Minahasans had a more sturdy build than the Sangirese by most morphological characteristics and typological features. The body proportions of the Minahasans and Sangirese were compared with the corresponding parameters in representatives of other Mongoloid and Equatorial populations of Asia, Oceania, and Australia using multidimensional statistical methods. It was concluded that the Sangirese were the closest to the Equatorial anthropological type by body characteristics among the studied Mongoloid groups of Southeast Asia.

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Corrado Gini

Papers

The physical anthropology of the Seminole Indians of Oklahoma