476 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
joint. Since there is contact only through the outer table of bone, all 
of the piece which includes most of the sagittal suture, and hence the 
vertex of the vault, could be raised or lowered without revealing the 
correct position. The only solution to this problem was to position 
this piece of bone arbitrarily so as to get a symmetrical appearance 
relative to the median plane. I believe that I may have placed this 
piece a little higher than it was originally. If this is true, it is due to 
the warping of the whole neurocranium already referred to. In justi- 
fication of the position adopted I can only say that all other arrange- 
ments yielded outlines more asymmetrical than the present one. 
Nevertheless, cranial height cannot be seriously affected. 
I realize, of course, that intact skulls are never wholly symmetri- 
cal. This is one reason for letting the joined fragments determine 
the over-all form. However, in assembling a fragmentary skull, as 
in the present instance, one has to assume original symmetry. When, 
in spite of this assumption, gaps develop, it is reasonable to attribute 
them to pustmortem warping. Considering the fact that a rock 
rested on this skull and the skull was recovered from a depth of 4.34 
meters in the cave deposits, some warping should be expected. Ad- 
vanced suture closure may have helped the skull sustain the pressures 
until the warping was fixed in the bone. 
Besides being warped and thus rendered asymmetrical postmortem, 
the Shanidar skull shows signs of having been asymmetrical antemor- 
tem. The signs are in the form of scars and indicate that this in- 
dividual suffered injuries about the face and forehead. The frontal 
scars are simply roughenings and depressions of the surface of the 
bone, mainly on the right side; they did not alter appreciably the 
outlines of the vault. On the other hand, the old healed injury to 
the left side of the face altered the shape of the orbit, the supraor- 
bital ridge and the malar bone. The left orbit is compressed from 
the side and its outer border is sharper than the corresponding one 
on the right. The left supraorbital ridge, unlike the right, is divided 
into two parts by an unnatural depression (scar). The left malar 
bone, in addition to involvement of the part forming the lateral wall 
of the orbit, is flattened so that the zygomatic arch presents a decided 
contrast in shape to its counterpart of the right. The location of 
the scars on the forepart of the head suggests injuries received in 
combat. 
Interesting as these scars are, inasmuch as they seem to reflect oc- 
cupational hazards, they were a nuisance in reconstructing the incom- 
plete left side of the face. It is easy, of course, in normal specimens 
to make one side of the face the mirror image of the other. But in 
abnormal specimens the eye alone is the judge of correctness of resto- 
ration. In the present instance three unconnected facial fragments 
(one abnormal) had to be oriented largely by eye. At the same time 
