Uriah

The first is that East European brachycephaly coincided with Christianization and the rises of cities. The trend toward short, wide skulls began first in towns before it spread into the country, and rural areas only began to catch up with the rise of feudalism.

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.