The Many Facets of the Human Skull


According to Wikipedia.org, the adult skull is normally made up of 22 bones.  Except for the mandible, all of the bones of the skull are joined together by sutures, synarthrodial (immovable) joints formed by bony ossification, with Sharpey's fibres permitting some flexibility.

At birth, the human skull is made up of 40 separate bony elements. As growth occurs, many of these bony elements gradually fuse together into solid bone. 

The skull is one of the most durable substances found in nature. In some cases, however, of head injury, there can be raised intracranial pressure through mechanisms such as a subdural haematoma.

In these cases the raised intracranial pressure can cause herniation of the brain out of the foramen magnum ('coning') because there is no space for the brain to expand; this can result in significant brain damage or death unless an urgent operation is performed to relieve the pressure. This is why patients with concussion must be watched extremely carefully.


Dating back to Neolithic times, a skull operation called trepanation was sometimes performed. This involved drilling holes in the cranium. Examination of skulls from this period reveals that the "patients" sometimes survived for many years afterward. It seems likely that trepanation was performed for ritualistic or religious reasons and not only as an attempted life-saving technique.

Like the face of a living individual, a human skull and teeth can also tell, to a certain degree, the life history and origin of its owner. Forensic scientists and archaeologists use metric and nonmetric traits to estimate what the bearer of the skull looked like.



In general, male skulls tend to be larger and more robust than female skulls, which are more gracile. Male skulls typically have more prominent supraorbital ridges, a more prominent glabella, and more prominent temporal lines. Male skulls on average have larger, broader palates, squarer orbits, larger mastoid processes, larger sinuses, and larger occipital condyles than those of females. Male mandibles typically have squarer chins and thicker, rougher muscle attachments than female mandibles.


All of these features vary considerably within human populations, making it difficult to identify the sex of a skull without knowledge of the population from which it came.

Although persons' descents are occasionally stereotyped as different from other ethnic groups on the basis of a variety of traits like eye, hair and skin color, all such characters are not discrete nor preserved in bones.

Among archaeologists and forensic scientists, it is still sometimes stated that the most consistent and unique trait of ancestry in skeleton is skull shape.

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