Creating reference data on sex for ancient populations using the Probabilistic Sex Diagnosis method: A validation test using the results of aDNA analysis

Abstract

The study aimed to test the applicability of the Probabilistic Sex Diagnosis (DSP) method in the bioarchaeological context by validation with known sex data obtained by aDNA analysis on the medieval samples from the Eastern Adriatic coast. We tested the method on 57 skeletons of known sex using 30 different combinations of measurements. The possibility of sex estimation ranged from 35.90 to 86.11% depending on the combinations used while sexing accuracy ranged from 92.86 to 100%. Females were classified correctly in all cases, and only one male was misclassified in all combinations that could be tested. Accuracy rates higher than 95% were obtained for every combination where the number of available measurements was larger than 15. Therefore, we encourage further validation of the method on different ancient populations and implementation of the method for creating reference sex data and development of metric and non-metric population-specific sex estimation standards.