The objective of the proposed cooperative project is to test the morphological relationships between the prehistoric and modern populations in the various parts of China. The intent is to see whether the craniofacial morphology of regionally identified modern Chinese populations differs to the same -- or to a greater or lesser -- degree as modern Chinese in a given area differ from their Neolithic antecedents in the same as well as in other parts of China. Coordinated with the historical and archaeological record of population movements from one part of China to another, compared with previously collected data from past and present European populations, and considered in the perspective of data to be gathered on Amerindian samples, this should give a scale for measuring the rate of non-adaptive morphological change through time. Ultimately this will allow the investigators to say just how long it has taken for the various differences between the major regional populations of Homo sapiens to have developed. This project involves collaboration with the Chinese Institute of Archaeology where the collections are housed. This collaboration is critical to the success of the project and could yield a longer term collaborative approach to studying other Chinese collections which have been largely unavailable to US scientists.
