Anthropological estimations in mixed populations: The next challenge in forensic anthropology

Abstract

The migration between countries often is relate to who is seeking a better quality of life, taking refuge from armed conflicts, disasters, illegal trades such as human trafficking, drugs etc. When limited or blocked, the immigration process starts to look after more dangerous and lethal routes as sea crossings as have been happening in the Mediterranean Sea. The lack of medical or dental antemortem from those human remains worse de identification process. The central purpose of forensic anthropology is: sex, age at death, stature and ancestry estimation aiming the human remains identification. The main objective of this study is to compare the mostly used protocols for sex, age at death and ancestry estimations with data from identified skeletons. At the Department of Anatomy of the Federal University of Bahia there is a program for body and skeletal donations, these human remains are donated by the family to research and education purposes. Approved by ethical committee, we are analysing these skeletons, the anthropological analysis are performed at the forensic anthropological laboratory of the Medico-legal Institute Nina Rodrigues, Salvador. We have already performed six anthropological analyses that show an interesting and greatly divergent results for ancestry as can be seen at the)(. Using the open access anthropological protocols site “osteomics.com” we input our data in order to compare the results from Ancestrees (Navega et al., 2015) and Hefner (2009) on line protocols, with the information from our sample. The primary results show a very concerning data. Moreover, we suggest that application of those protocols in mixed populations require intense training and careful conclusions. These are preliminary results but we are bringing up the discussion concerning the use of ancestry estimations protocols in very mixed populations such as in Brazil.