A Life of Research in Biological Anthropology

I much appreciated being invited to write a contribution for this journal, but initially presumed that what was required was a comprehensive review of some major issue in biological anthropology. Indeed I drafted a contribution on the history of the subject during the second part of the twentieth century. I was then firmly told that this was not what was wanted, rather something much more autobiographical. Well that is what you have got: an extremely personal account of my own research career over some 50 years in biological anthropology. I have summarized the results of what I consider the main projects I and my colleagues have undertaken and tried to document successes and failures. I cannot claim any earth-shattering discovery but hope that we have contributed in a substantial way to the further understanding of the nature of human variation, a main concern of biological anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century.

Canonical correlation analysis of assortative mating in two groups of Brazilians

In two groups of people, 98 couples in which the husband was a military serviceman and 63 couples of Jewish ancestry living in Porto Alegre, Brazil, age at marriage, age at time of survey, fifteen anthropometric variables, and hair and eye colour were studied. Proper adjustments of the data were made taking into consideration duration of cohabitation, aging and secular effects, and skewness in the distributions. There are some differences between the two groups in age at marriage, but in both there is a tendency for those currently older to have married later in life. The correlation coefficients between spouses are with very few exceptions positive, with no indication of preferences for opposites. Size and factors related to body build are the most readily detectable agents in the assortative mating occurring in this population, but in the military group relative lengths of leg and trunk, rather than stature itself, are important in conditioning mate choice.