The flat back of the head thing was discovered by physical anthropologists to their dismay to be heavily affected by nurture as well as nature: it turned out there were a lot of cultures where babies were "cradle-boarded" -- strapped down flat to a hard board, which mom can wear as a backpack. This tended to flatten the back of the skull permanently. Carleton Coon found out about this in the 1930s and then had to revamp a lot of confident theorizing about the genealogy of subracial groups that had been done based on head shapes. |