Origins of Uralic-speaking populations:craniological evidence.
Data on 55 modern cranial samples representing Uralic and other Eurasian populations were subjected to canonical variate (CV) and principal component (PC) analysis for 6 nonmetric and 14 metric traits, respectively. While PC1 and CV1 reveal strong east-to-west gradients among the Uralians, PC2 and CV2 separate most of them from the remaining groups, suggesting that they have descended from an ancestral proto-Uralian population. The biologically "Uralic" features survive in modern Uralic groups despite the fact that the initial split was followed by a long period of hybridization with widely dissimilar people. Our results confirm that the ancestors of many Turkish-speaking groups as well as the Yukaghirs belonged to the proto-Uralic community.
Moiseyev
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V
Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Saint-Petersburg-34, Russia. vmoiseyev@mail.ru
D000884:Anthropology, Cultural; D000885:Anthropology, Physical; D000886:Anthropometry; D001208:Asia; D005075:Biological Evolution; D005060:Europe; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D012886:Skull / Q000033:anatomy & histology*