The Peabody Museum at Harvard University possesses a collection of skeletal remains from
Iceland consisting of 1 complete skeleton, 2 incomplete skeletons, 3 skulls with mandibles, 80 skulls
without mandibles, including 60 in fairly good condition, 62 odd mandibles, and a large number of
long bones and other skeletal parts (4). Hooton (4) investigated this collection and in his article “On
certain Eskimoid characters” he discussed striking resemblances to Eskimo characters exhibited in
this Icelandic collection, which he considered were probably not racial characters, but rather
environmental adaptations among people living in the Arctic or sub-Arctic regions and living
primarily on a diet of fish and flesh. These characters are torus mandibularis, torus palatinus, the
thickened tympanic plate and the scaphoid skull vault. He considered this a mechanical adaptation
due to excessive development of the masticatory apparatus