"The anthropological features of Armenian and Assyrian (Aissori) women."

[Transhumanist]

Came across this interesting bit --apart from the suggested probability of board-cradling-- regarding Assyrians, from an abstract for a presentation nearly a decade ago at the Seventy-First Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists:

Geometric morphometric methods were employed to investigate the Craniofaciometric relationships among six Iraqi ethno-religious groups. Nine 2-dimensional co-ordinates were digitized on published side view photographs of adult males of the following groups: Assyrians (Nestorian Christians, Neo-Aramaic speakers, n = 86), Kurdistan (mostly Sunni Muslim and Kurdish speakers, n = 9), Upper Iraq (mostly Sunni and qeltu-Arabic, n = 10), South Euphrates (Shi’i Muslim, gelet-Arabic speakers, n = 109), Ahwar (Shi’i, gelet, n =63) and Middle Iraq (mostly Baghdad, transition zone between the Sunni qeltu and Shi’i gelet, n = 28).

Generalized procrustes and thin-plate spline analyses were used to acquire the shape variables. The first principal component (49.9%) of the shape variation was found to correspond largely to the angle between the plane of the face and the camera and was regressed from subsequent analyses.

Even though most of the variability was within group, permuted MANOVA tests showed a significant difference between the Assyrians and all other groups (p<0.001). Thin-plate spline deformation grids suggested that the Assyrians differed mainly in the position of the opisthocranion, probably a result of occiput flattening by board-cradling. After omitting the opisthocranion from the analysis, the difference between the Assyrians and other groups remained highly significant (p<0.001), seemingly reflecting a relative elongation of the facial region in Assyrians on average. Average unwarped images showed other group differences not captured by the landmarks: the Assyrians have relatively heavier jaws and less prominent zygomas on average. The craniofaciometric interrelationships among the groups are discussed within an environmental and historical context.

Craniofaciometric diversity in Iraqi Males
W. Gharaibeh.

[Arkadi Agapetos]

Here is a plot from Dienekes' Anthropology Blog comparing Armenians to other West Asians: