l l HOMO — Journal of Comparative Human Biology 56 (2005) 233–247 Mandibular fossa of fossil Australians Hayley Green, Darren Curnoe à Department of Anatomy, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia Received 1 November 2004; accepted 10 June 2005 Abstract Many questions about the skeletal adaptations and morphology of hunter-gatherers on the Australian continent remain unanswered. One anatomical region receiving little research in Australian fossils to date is the mandibular fossa. Here we report a study of three size dimensions, three shape indices and three morphological (non-metric) features of the mandibular fossa in 11 fossil Australians comparing them with modern Australo-Melanesian samples. We find broad similarities in past and modern populations in this region. Early and modern Australians and modern Papua New Guineans have elongate, broad and shallow fossae. All three populations show similarity in articular tubercle size, but postglenoid tubercle and entoglenoid process sizes show unexpected affinities. We also test for the possible presence of temporal trends in mandibular fossa size among fossil Australians. Our analyses indicate that none are present. r 2005 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. Introduction Human remains from Pleistocene and Holocene Australia have attracted much research attention. They provide information about the timing and processes involved in the colonisation of the continent. Moreover, Australian remains are ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.de/jchb 0018-442X/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jchb.2005.06.001 à Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 2 93858025; fax: +61 2 93858016. E-mail addresses: h.green@student.unsw.edu.au (H. Green), d.curnoe@unsw.edu.au (D. Curnoe).