What are the main distinguishing features of caucasoid, mongoloid and africoid skull? What are the difference?

Question

What are the main distinguishing features of caucasoid, mongoloid and africoid skull? What are the difference?

Answer 1

Give the guy above me ten points you wont get a more honest and correct answer.

Answer 2

Actually, there is such a thing.

I agree that phrenologists were completely off base and we are genetically alike (as a previous answerer stated), but any osteologist or forensic anthropologist will tell you there are differences.  It is no different than people having different colors for hair, eyes, and skin.  It is all a part of the adaptive processes.  In addition, forensic anthropologists make facial reconstructions based on these features to help identify skeletal remains....And they are amazingly accurate.  Of course, you may already know all this.

Caucasoid:  Caucasoid skulls have a nasal sill.  This nasal sill (or dam) can usually be found inside the nasal opening.  Caucasoids have a face that comes to a point along the midline.  Their cheek bones don't extend forward.  They have retreating zygomatics.  This is where the facial features below the nose are retreated back into the skull and are flatter from the chin to below the nose.  Caucasoids often have a long narrow face, a narrow nasal opening, depressed nasal root, and a narrow high bridge for the nose.

Africoid (for some reason, yahoo won't let me use the actual scientific term for this racial distinction) skulls don't have a nasal sill.  Their skull exhibits prognathism, which is the oposite of the Caucasoidal retreating zygomatcs.  Their mouth protrudes outward.  They have little or no nasal depression, a rounded forehead, bregmatic depression, a wide nasal opening, and often have an almost ivory texture to the bone.

Mongoloid:  Mongoloid skulls are between to two extremes with the nasal sill.  Mongoloids havea much flatter face than Caucasoids, and the cheek bones extend further forward.

Their faice is also moonlike.  They have an edge to edge bite.  Many American Indian incisor teeth have occlusal wear (older skulls that is).  Mongoloids also have shovel-shaped incisors and in some cases they are turned slightly to the midline.  Often the zygomatic bones dip below the edge of the maxilla, and they have a nasal overgrowth (the nasal bones project forward past where it meets with the front part of the maxilla).

This is not a matter of race as the previous answerers seem to think.  It has to do with how the human body changes as an adaptation to its surroundings over time.  It doesn't change the fact that all races (not social races, but more demographic and human feature related) are virtually the same.  We are all equally human.  Our differences in this distinction of race are no different than the different colors of skin, hair, eyes, stature and more that everyone has.  As the world becomes a smaller place and there are more mixing of the races; these features also blend.