Variability of ancient and modern population groups from the Far East: integrating four systems of morphological traits

This study discusses methodological aspects of population history of the Far East including the Japanese archipelago, and test integration offour systems of anthropological features craniometry, cranioscopy, odontometry, and odintoscopy. The main objective was to compare the differentiating capacities of each system of morphological traits and analyze their interrelationship. The data on thirteen ancient groups and groups which lived close to the present time were subjected to canonical analysis (metric features) or principle component analysis (non-metric features). The vector scores obtained were treated as new features for integrated principle component analysis thereby producing new integrative principle components which included information about variability of all analyzed systems of traits. The analysis confirmed effectiveness of using integrated data from several systems of morphological traits for reconstructing the population history. It has been shown that different biological systems reflected different chronological episodes. All systems of traits used in the study differentiated only between the Jomon and Ainu samples, while other series demonstrated their specificity only within some or even one system of traits. This supports our assumption that no single standard system of morphological traits is able to reveal the whole population history due to the limited number of effective traits.