Uriah

Georgian historians have noticed a similar process in their own country that also coincided with feudalism and which I think created a convergence in personality and appearance with East Europeans that I’ll get to in a bit.

Nazi anthropologists were a bit disconcerted when they discovered that Germans as a people are actually quite brachycephalic. The only section of the country to have totally resisted the trend were the cattle raising people of Schleswig-Holstein

I think the advantage that dolicocephals possessed was that dolicocephaly in North Europeans is actually a consequence of brain overgrowth induced by milk consumption. The lactose tolerant enjoyed a strong advantage in the country that was lost in cities; milk is hard to move.

The trend toward feudalization was probably more decisive than urbanization in the long run. Northwest Europeans preserved tolerance partly because of their low population density but also because they broke away from feudalism early and independent farmers drank more milk.

So why, absent milk, do bracycephalics outcompete the longheads? Well, they're better at everything: they conserve heat more easily, have a higher ratio of brain volume to surface area, and it's easier to for a small, spherical head to stay symmetrical and pretty than a long one.

In my first post on Polynesia I passed along what Houghton had noticed: that Polynesians should have long narrow heads but instead have a polar brachycephalic type instead. A perceptive commenter noted that North Europeans saliently defy this trend.

Skull type is not just a physical quality, it has an impact on national character as well.

There a similar, but weaker trend toward xenophobia in the German speaking Alps as exemplified by….well you can figure it out.

The same combination of extreme good looks (Kim Kardashian and xenophobia (Mark Krikorian) can be seen in the recently brachycephalized peopled of the Caucasus.