  The origin of the seeds which develop into the observed super-massive black
holes at high redshifts may be hard to interpret in the context of the standard
$\Lambda CDM$ of early universe cosmology based on Gaussian primordial
perturbations. Here we consider the modification of the halo mass function
obtained by introducing skewness and kurtosis of the primordial fluctuations.
We show that such primordial non-Gaussianities constrained by the current
observational bounds on the nonlinearity parameters of $f_{NL}$ and $g_{NL}$
are not effective at greatly increasing the number density of seeds which could
develop into super-massive black holes at high redshifts. This is to be
contrasted with the role which cosmic string loops could play in seeding
super-massive black holes.

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics;Astrophysics of Galaxies;General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology;High Energy Physics - Phenomenology;High Energy Physics - Theory