Size and shape components of anthropometric differences among the Yanadis.

Size and shape components of Mahalanobis D2 were computed from a set of anthropometric characters among the Yanadis, a tribe in the south eastern part of Andhra Pradesh, India. These people are in a transitional stage of development and show differences in sociocultural variables between different geographical regions. From the study it appears that the pattern of differences due to size and shape is the same as that of general distance, irrespective of whether the distances were computed for male, female or pooled data, with some exceptions for females. The noteworthy finding is that the shape components for men and women dominate and are more similar than corresponding size components, thereby indicating that males and females are morphologically similar with respect to their relative measurements. The association of the morphological distances for the five breeding populations with the corresponding road, map and migrational distances were also investigated using simple and partial correlations. The results suggest that the migrational distance among the three is the strongest influencing factor for the morphological differences. The road distance also maintains a very high degree of association, especially with shape components.