Cranial measures and ancient DNA both show greater similarity of Neandertals to recent modern Eurasians than to recent modern sub‐Saharan Africans

Objectives Ancient DNA analysis has shown that present‐day humans of Eurasian ancestry are more similar to Neandertals than are present‐day humans of sub‐Saharan African ancestry, reflecting interbreeding after modern humans first left Africa. We use craniometric data to test the hypothesis that the crania of recent modern humans show the same pattern. Materials and Methods We computed Mahalanobis squared distances between a published Neandertal centroid based on 37 craniometric traits and each of 2,413 recent modern humans from the Howells global data set (N = 373 sub‐Saharan Africans, N = 2,040 individuals of Eurasian descent). Results The average distance to the Neandertal centroid is significantly lower for Eurasian crania than for sub‐Saharan African crania as expected from the findings of ancient DNA (p