and brachycephalic Laponoid and, in a lesser degree, Armenoid one. These tendencies makes possible to understand the sense of time series in facial skeleton towards better profiled nose and orthognathism associated with the process of brachycephalisation. Parenthetically, it is worthy to say that the composition of the crania from the XVIII—XIX century is almost guishable from the living people of the neighboring Pinczow region elaborated by I. Michalski (1949) and examined about 1930. A good exemplification of a comparativeness of living people with osseous material when the individual typological analysis is applied!

Discussion of the results

The results of the analysis of the time series both in single traits and racial structure allow to infer some more general conclusions.

At first, our data do not reveal any gracilisation of the skull in the sense of G. F. Debetz (1948) since there are no regular changes in the profile of the forehead and glabellar region as well as in bizygomatic diameter. Perhaps, this process was completed in Poland at an earlier time, that is, before the early medieval period.

Another question bears the process of brachycephalisation. Its apparent regularity seems to contradict the hjrpothesis of transforming of dominance advanced by J. Czekanowski (1930). A further objection against this hypothesis gives the comparison of brachycephalic types from early medieval period with the same types from the recent times (table 7).

Table 7

The comparison of meso-brachycephalic types in different time periods

Type

Neolithic

Early medieval

Modern

Subnordic (AL) Sublaponoid (EL) Alpine (HL)

82 , 3 79,2

85 , 2

83 , 4 79,2 84,8

85 , 2 79,6 86,9

Investigator

Kapica (1958)

Wiercinski

Michalski (1956)

The types do not show any dominance of dolichocephaly over brachycephaly remaining practically the same from Neolithic period up to this date.

Also , an old hypothesis of evolutionary transforming the head into spherical perfect form owing to its ,,geometrical economy" should be regarded as highly doubtful since brachycephalisation does not occur as an independent variable and is associated with the changes in the facial skeleton. Still other difficulties are evolved by the hypothesis of a sudden negative selection pressure on dolichocephals in connection with medieval great epidemics because we do not observe in this period any significant deviation from the straight line in time series of arithmetic mean of cephalic index as well as any sudden change in the racial composition.

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