Identifier

etd-04072014-182816

Degree

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Geography and Anthropology

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

Physical anthropologists have a toolkit for determining sex from skeletal remains composed of visual and metric techniques concerning the pelvis and the skull. However, complete elements are not always available and results can be indeterminate. The present study combines visual assessment of the skull with statistical methods of shape analysis, geometric morphometrics, to reach a better understanding of how cranial variation of the frontal bone is influenced by sex. The three-dimensional coordinates of frontal bone curvatures of 204 skulls from the Terry Collection were collected using a Microscribe digitizer. These data were used to assess the ability of this technique to estimate sex. Results of a Procrustes distance analysis of variance (ANOVA) suggest that variation in frontal bone curvature is explained best by sex compared to variables of ancestry and visual score. A discriminant function analysis (DFA) cross-validation test of sex classification showed the DFA correctly assigns frontal bones as female with 88.3% accuracy and males with 70.4% accuracy. These results suggest that this technique may be useful in future sex estimation software.

Date

2014

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Listi, Ginesse

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.1749

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