Sexual dimorphism of crania in a Romanian population: Discriminant function analysis approach for sex estimation

Abstract

Regarding sex estimation on human skeletal remains, the current trend in forensic anthropology is towards creating national standards, as population-specificity of discriminant functions is now a known fact. Also, over the last period of time, discriminant function analysis of osteometric data has become the method of choice in forensic anthropology, as it renders high accuracy results, superior to those obtained by visual shape assessment or direct metric comparison.<br/> We have conducted a study on 200 adult crania (100 males, 100 females) from a modern Romanian population sample (Rainer collection, Bucharest). Based on 11 cranial measurements, we have calculated population-specific discriminant functions for intact crania, cranial vault and facial region measurements, as well as single-variable DF. The results point to a pronounced craniometric sexual dimorphism in Romanian population, similar to other European populations: sexing accuracies of 88% on intact crania, 81% on cranial vault measurements and 83.5% on facial measurements respectively, with 83.5% correctly assigned by facial breadth alone discriminant function. Discussions on the results, as well as comparisons with similar studies are presented below.