THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 



UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO 



LA JOLLA. CALIFORNIA 



March 6, 1915 



Canada 



Geological Survey 

 Museum Bulletin No. 9. 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL SERIES, NO. 4. 



The Glenoid Fossa in the Skull of the Eskimo. 

 By F. H. S. KNOWLES. 



The glenoid fossae in the human skull are concave depres- 

 sions on the basal aspect of the temporal bones. Each fossa 

 is divided into two parts by the Glaserian fissure; the anterior 

 portion concave, smooth, and bounded in front by the eminentia 

 articularis, serves for the articulation of the condyle of the lower 

 jaw; the posterior portion, rough and bounded behind by the 

 tympanic plate, serves for the reception of part of the parotid 

 gland. It is with the anterior portion that I intend to deal, 

 and my object in this paper is to show that in the skulls of those 

 Eskimo who have existed under the primitive conditions of life 

 habitual to their race, the surface for articulation with the man- 

 dible is not deeply concave as in the skulls of modern highly 

 civilized races, but tends on the whole to be shallow, and in 

 many instances very remarkably so. I have examined numbers 

 of skulls belonging to various primitive races and in many of them 

 one can pick out crania presenting flattening of this fossa in a 

 more or less marked degree. W. L. H. Duckworth in his "Studies 

 in Anthropology," page 107, notes in his description of some 

 aboriginal Australian crania in the Cambridge University 

 Museum: "It is here to be remarked that the glenoid fossae 

 of this specimen (No. 2137) are very shallow and flattened, 

 the flattening being most pronounced in the region of the an- 



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