Taiwan Aboriginals and Peoples of the Pacific-Asia Region: Multivariate Craniometric Comparisons.

RefereedStepwise discriminant function analysis and Mahalanobis’s generalized distance are applied to twenty-nine cranial measurements recorded in 2,531 male crania representing five Taiwan aboriginal cranial series and fifty prehistoric, modern, and near modern human groups. The Taiwan aboriginal cranial series include modern samples of Atayal, Bunun, Pazeh, Babuza, and archaeological human remains from the Shi San Hang site (ca 1800-500 BP). The comparative cranial series represent East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. The results of two separate analyses, one using five and the other using fifty-five groups, are presented. A relatively close connection between the Babuza, Pazeh, and Shi San Hang aboriginal cranial series is observed while the Atayal and Bunun series remain relatively well differentiated. Connections between Taiwan aboriginal groups and cranial series from Polynesia suggest that Taiwan’s aboriginal inhabitants may have been the ancestral source of these inhabitants of Remote Oceania. Similarly, these results suggest that the ultimate source of Taiwan’s prehistoric and modern aboriginal groups may be among the early inhabitants of eastern (Northeast or Southeast) Asia. The results of the present craniometric analysis are compared with other lines of evidence which have been used to examine the affinities and origins of Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples