Human biological variation in the light of certain morphological and molecular biological traits.

This doctoral thesis is submitted in the form of science publications with impact factor and presents human biological variation in two different ways. The first part is the study of phenotype variation focused on the degree of limb bones bilateral asymmetry. Besides genetic and hormonal factors asymmetry may develop as a response to biomechanical and to environmental factors influencing the individual/population. Therefore this trait can be considered as a measure of person's living conditions, health or environmental stress of different origin or exa- mine the effects of behavioral distinctions as sexual division of labor and diffe- rences in subsistence strategy. The submitted publication (Kujanová et al., 2008) is based on samples of two diachronic populations (medieval and recent) from Bohe- mia with different expected levels of health/environmental stress. The study is fo- cused especially on these aspects that may be indicative of various stresses, such as malnutrition or other nonspecific factors influencing health of persons living in the studied populations. According to the results we propose that bilateral asymmetry observed in the diachronic populations showed some differences supporting the theory that the medieval population was not subjected to as highly stressful condi- tions as the..