Histological Age Estimation of a Cadaveral Sample of Diverse Origins

Abstract

ABSTRACTDetermining age at death of fragmentary, skeletonized human remains can be difficult. We report on an investigation of the efficacy of published methods using bone histology as a predictor of age at death, applying them to a genetically diverse recent human sample. Two histological methods (Stout, 1986; Stout and Paine, 1992) were tested on samples from 6th ribs derived from skeletonized cadavers (N = 62, ages 24–95 years, 24 F, 38M) from the University of Cape Town Medical School, South Africa. This sample includes 23 individuals classified under the apartheid system as ‘whites’, 20 as ‘blacks’ and 19 as ‘coloureds’; sources include bequeathments and the unclaimed bodies of paupers. The methods, based on an expected age-associated increase in osteon population density, consistently underestimated age at deatti, by several decades. The hypothesized positive linear relationship between age and osteon population density (OPD) exists only among males over fifty years of age, who represent half of the UCT sample. The absence of the expected relationship between age and OPD in the remaining sub-samples—including all females and males under fifty years—may include extrinsic, methodological features of this study, and a range of intrinsic factors that influence bone remodelling. The latter include the influences of alcohol and malnutrition.