An Anthropological Study Of The Skeletons In Tombs Of Han, Tang And Song Dynasties From Xuecun Site Of Xingyang And Other Sites Of Xinzheng, Zhengzhou City, Henan Province

The Ethnic Huaxia which mainly composed of the Xia people, Shang people and Zhou peoplecame into being in the medium and later period of the Western Zhou. During the Qin-Han period,Huaxia ethnic group had grown into the Ethnic Han. The procedure of the Ethnic Han developingher own group and assimilating other ethnic groups for more than2000years has been studied bymany historians, nationalists and humanists. However, the composition of the diverse populations inthe Ethnic Han had been changing since Han dynasty and the anthropologists should study theskeletons in antiquity tombs to look into the causes and the course of the changing.The skeletons in tombs of Han, Tang and Song dynasties from Xuecun site of Xingyang andother sites of Xinzheng, Zhengzhou city, Henan province have been studied in this dissertation. Inthis study, several physical anthropology methods have been used, including demography, statureestimation, human osteology, paleopathology, and statistics. Moreover, the research results canprovide some informations to the scholars who study the health of populations in Central China andwho study the ancient population migrations and the development about the cranial morphologicalcharacteritics. There are seven chapters in this dissertation.Chapter Ⅰ gives a brief description of the concepts about the Ethnic Huaxia and the Ethnic Hanand the relationship between them. The geographical locations and archaeological backgrounds ofthe Xuecun site and other sites in Zhengzhou city have been introduced. And the purpose and thephysical anthropology methods have been explained.Chapter Ⅱ focuses on the sex ratio, age distribution, mean age at death of the populations inHan, Tang and Song dynasties. A comparison of the average mortality rates on many populationsin Central China indicates that the life-spans have been prolonged in the three periods, but the highmortality rates for young women also demonstrates the economic and medical treatment were at alow level.Chapter Ⅲ is about stature estimation. In this chapter, body heights have been estimated fromthe maxium lengths of all the humeri, femora and tibias in adult men and women of Han, Tang andSong dynasties. In order to compare male-female difference in body size numerically, an index ofsexual dimorphism was computed based on the stature estimates. We can draw a conclusion thatbody heights both sexes were becoming increasingly shorter with the times and the differencebetween both sexes’contribution to subsistence was little.Chapter Ⅳ is about paleopathology. This chapter uses trauma, pathology, developmental defects and oral health.Chapter Ⅴ uses non-metrical and metrical morphology of ancient human crania to learn thecharacteristic of cranial shape in Han, Tang and Song dynasties. We concluded that all thepopulations in the three periods were Asian Mongoloids. The racial type of all the populations wasclosely related to the modern East Asiatic Mongoloids, and skulls of the three periods in Zhengzhouwere similar possibly to the modern North Asiatic Mongoloids, the modern South AsiaticMongoloids and the modern Northeast Asiatic Mongoloids.Chapter Ⅵ uses Average Root-Mean-Square of array differential function, cluster analysis andprincipal component analysis to compare the three groups of Han, Tang and Song dynasties inZhengzhou with other groups of ancient and modern times, in order to discuss the related problemsof those developments about the types and composition of race. This study shows that the elementfeature of the three groups of Han, Tang and Song dynasties was Ancient Central China Type.Maybe, there were some genes of ancient “Kiang” in the Northwest area and ancient nomadicpeople in the North area in the population of Han dynasty. And there were more genes of alien racesin the population of Tang dynasty. But the physical character of the population of Song dynasty wasranging among Ancient Central China Type, Ancient Northeast China Type, Ancient NortheastChina Type, etc. The population of Han dynasty looks like the modern South China population. Butthe two populations of Tang dynasty and the modern South China differ in shape more obviously.And the population of Song dynasty looks more evidently like the modern North China population.Chapter Ⅶ makes a summarized discussion about the whole six chapters.