关键词: 骨骼测量;下颌骨;澳洲土著

Abstract: The human skeletons of Coobool Creek were found in 1950 by G. M. Black from the central Murray River Valley area of Southern New South Wales, Australia. The authors took measurements of the height of mental foramen and the height of mandibulat body at the level of this foramen and calculated an index from these two items to indicate the relative height of this foramen. The results show that both individual variations and variations between both sides are large. There is no significant difference between the mean values of both sides.
The average of data of both sides is obtained to represent the figure of each individual. The statistical results shown in table 1 are based on these averages. The data of near contemporary mandibles of Australian aborigines in Table 1 are cited from Wu and Wei (1986) .
The discoverer of the Coobool Creek skeletcns, G. M. Black was an engineer and farmer, rather than a trained archaeologist. No precise archaeological, stratigraphical or chronological data are available for the material which he excavated. However, morphological and metrical comparisons with the Kow Swamp series (Thorne, 1976) suggests an age of 9000-13000 years B. C. (Brown, 1981) . More evidences for inferring its chronology are needed. Wu (1961) had presented an average value of 46. 3 for the relative height of 20 mental foramina of casts of Eurasian Pleistocene Homo sapiens sapiens in his article dealing with the study of Upper Cave Man at Zhoukoudian, Beijing. The corresponding mean value of male and female averages of Coobool Creek skeletons is 46. 2 which is close to Wu's data mentioned above. Wu and Wei (1986) reported that no significant difference is found between Chinese and the near contemporary Australian aborigines for the three items mentioned in this paper except absolute height of male mental foramen. So the change from Coobool Creek to modern Australian aborigines is foundamentally similar to that from Eurasian Ileistocene H. s. sapiens to modern Chinese. If there existed a similar tendency in the change from Pleistocene H. s. sapiens to modern man for the relative height of mental foramen in the two continents, the results indicated in this paper support the inference that Coobool skeletons are terminal Pleistocene in age.

Key words: Osteometry; Mandible; Australian aborigines