Taxonomic congruence in Eskimoid populations

Abstract

The study compares distance relationships in Eskimoid populations based on metric and attribute data with linguistic relationships based on structural and lexicostatistical data. Taxonomic congruence and the non‐specificity hypothesis are investigated by matrix correlations and by a clustering procedure. The matrix correlation approaches employed are the Pearson product‐moment correlation coefficient and the Spearman rank‐order correlation coefficient. An unweighted pair‐group clustering procedure provides a visual comparison of biological and linguistic relationships. Data consist of 74 craniometric measurements and 28 cranial observations taken on 12 Eskimoid populations. Mahalanobis' D² and Balakrishnan and Sanghvi's B² were used to compute the metric and attribute distances, respectively. The results indicate that a strict adherence to the non‐specificity hypothesis is untenable. Also, there is better concordance between the sexes for metric distances than for attribute distances, and the metric data are more concordant with linguistic relationships than are the attribute data.