Note: this topic is from Tuesday, June 26, 2007. A re-ping.
turned out to be the remains of two older men and an infant. And it was the skull of one of the men that puzzled the forensic archaeologists. "A particular bone at the back of the head was not fused. This is an inherited trait found almost exclusively among the Incas of Peru," Buckholm added. To this day, no other example of this trait has been found in Norway. "
I think from this description they are referring to what is called the Inca bone (an interparietal bone). It is caused when a horozontal suture connects the lambdoidal sutures making an extra triangular bone out of the top of the occipital bone.
The distribution is worldwide, although highest in Peru:
Abstract: The variation in frequency of the Inca bone was examined in major human populations around the world. The New World populations have generally high frequencies of the Inca bone, whereas lower frequencies occur in northeast Asians and Australians. Tibetan/Nepalese and Assam/Sikkim populations in northeast India have more Inca bones than do neighbouring populations. Among modern populations originally derived from eastern Asian population stock, the frequencies are highest in some of the marginal isolated groups. In Central and West Asia as well as in Europe, frequency of the Inca bone is relatively low. The incidence of the complete Inca bone is, moreover, very low in the western hemisphere of the Old World except for Subsaharan Africa. Subsaharan Africans show as a whole a second peak in the occurrence of the Inca bone. Geographical and ethnographical patterns of the frequency variation of the Inca bone found in this study indicate that the possible genetic background for the occurrence of this bone cannot be completely excluded. Relatively high frequencies of the Inca bone in Subsaharan Africans indicate that this trait is not a uniquely eastern Asian regional character.Os incae: variation in frequency in major human population groups, by Tsunehiko Hanihara and Hajime Ishida, Journal of Anatomy, Vol. 198(Pt 2): 137–152. Source
Sounds like this is not necessarily a Peruvian mummy in Norway.
And how much more likely someone from Central Asia was engaged in trading along the silk road and wound up in Kiev and followed the trading route further to Scandinavia.
