Skeletal Criteria for Racial Attribution

Can ancestry be consistently determined from the skeleton?

“…In 14 cases (70%), individuals were identified as belonging to all three racial classes. Specimen 18 was identified as White by four methods (Bass 1995;Gill 1984;Rhine 1993;Wright 2008), Black by three methods (Giles & Elliot 1962;Iscan 1983;Patriquin et al 2002) and either Asian, Amerindian, Indigenous Australian or Oceanian by two methods (Brues 1990;Gill 1998). Specimen 10 was found to be majority White (six of the nine methods) however the CRANID software (Wright 2008) identified this individual as being a Sydney Aboriginal.…”

“…Despite this, the ability of the methods to determine the 'race' of this individual was ambiguous at best, with results showing that three and a half methods indicated White; three and a half indicated Black, and two indicated either Asian, Amerindian, Indigenous Australian or Oceanian. This suggests that determination of 'race' through individual morphological features of the skull (Bass 1995;Gill 1998;Rhine 1993) is limited by the specific sites available for examination. If, in the case of specimen 13, remains were fragmented and the mid-facial region was absent, the individual may have been identified as being White; a conclusion that would not be accepted had the skull been fully intact.…”

“…Some elements of variability can be attributed to genetic drift in small populations (Henneberg 22 Ingrid Sierp, Maciej Henneberg 2006;Rhine 1993) or to natural selection in antecedent populations, however, with the increasing levels of migration and the resultant gene flow, levels of variability of specific racial identifiers are increasing within local populations. In general, the concept of 'race' is ill suited to the study of human variation because this variation is quasi-continuous and most of it occurs among individuals in the same populations while only about a quarter is attributable to geographic distribution of people (Brace 2005;Henneberg 2010;Lewontin 1976).…”

“…In the literature there is a wide variety of methods used to ascertain the ancestry of skeletal samples. These methods used craniometric (Giles & Elliot 1962;Gill 1984;Wright 2008) and morphologic (Bass 1995;Brues 1990;Gill 1998;Rhine 1993) assessments of the skull and metric assessment of the pelvis (Iscan 1983;Patriquin et al 2002). These skeletal elements are commonly accepted as the gold standard for determining 'race' from skeletal remains.…”

A Quantitative Assessment of the Morphology of the Piriform Aperture as an Indicator of Race

“…The primary objective of the forensic anthropologist is to develop a biological profile, which reports age, sex, stature, and race along with any anomalies that will make personal identification easier for the authorities [2]. The skull is considered to be the most useful part of the skeleton for the assessment of race [3] [4]. Successful approaches to race determination of unidentified human remains using the skull have been developed by anatomists and biological anthropologists, but few quantitative methods are available for distinguishing various specimens [5].…”