Osteometric sex determination using proximal foot phalanges from a documented human skeletal collection

Abstract

Diagnosing sex is vital for developing biological profiles from human skeletal remains. For that purpose, osteometric evaluation of bone size has proven to be usually effective. The present study investigates the degree of sexual dimorphism in proximal foot phalanges from a documented human skeletal collection, known as the Athens collection. Furthermore, it utilizes the data for the development of sex-discriminant formulas in Greek population. The material used consists of 749 proximal foot phalanges (left and right), which belong to 174 adult individuals (91 males and 83 females) that lived during the 20(th) century. The degree of sexual dimorphism reached as high as 16.76 %, with the left side demonstrating higher sexual dimorphism. The 1(st) proximal foot phalanges are proven to be the most sexually dimorphic among the bones of the sample. The minimum sexual dimorphism observed was in the maximum lengths of phalanges, whereas the most sexually dimorphic measurement was the medio-lateral width at midshaft. The discriminant functions developed provide classification accuracies that ranged between 77.1 % and 90.9 % for left and between 72.2 % and 86.6 % for right proximal foot phalanges. The results of this study suggest that proximal foot phalanges are useful for sex determination in Greek population.

Biocultural evidence of precise manual activities in an Early Holocene individual of the high‐altitude Peruvian Andes

“…Aspects of sexual dimorphism in entheses are described primarily in terms of entheseal size (Foster et al, 2014;Karakostis & Lorenzo, 2016;Karakostis, Zorba, & Moraitis, 2014), where males tend to have larger muscle attachments than females. Because our approach focuses either on entheseal multivariate patterns (i.e., proportions among size-adjusted surface area measurements) or 3D shape coordinates (geometric morphometric analysis), and in light of the archaeological context of the 15-06 burial, we consider our interpretations to be robust.…”

Paleopathological study of a podal osteochondroma from the prehistoric Hypogeum of Calaforno (Sicily)

“…Skeletal maturity was assessed macroscopically by the fusion of the epiphyses (Cunningham, Scheuer, & Black, 2016). Sex was determined by the Karakostis et al regression equation using the required measurements (APWB = anteroposterior width at the base, APWH = anteroposterior width at the head, obtained with a digital sliding caliper with a calibration of 0.01 mm) and unstandardized coefficients and constant expressed in Function 6 for left proximal foot phalanges of the fourth ray (Karakostis, Zorba, & Moraitis, 2014). The external morphology of the mass was described in gross anatomical terms.…”

New horizons in reconstructing past human behavior: Introducing the “Tübingen University Validated Entheses‐based Reconstruction of Activity” method

“…In spite of the above arguments as well as the extensive use of multivariate analyses in most fields and lines of biological research (e.g., taxonomy, 53,54 genetics, 55 cross‐sectional biomechanics, 56,57 or forensic anthropology 58,59 ), such analyses are extremely rare in entheseal studies. In fact, the vast majority of past anthropological literature on entheses—including 3D studies on humans or laboratory animals—relied exclusively on either univariate or bivariate comparisons of single entheseal structures across individuals 12,17–19 .…”