The effect of age on the determination of race from the pelvis

Abstract

Determination of race from the postcranial skeleton has been a subject of several morphometric studies. A finding of those studies was that race assessment from the pelvis could be enhanced if the age of the specimen was known (scan, 1983) . Blacks sampled in this earlier study were considerably younger than Whites, raising the question of whether or not the discriminant functions used to differentiate race were responding primarily to age differences rather than genetic differences. This question was analyzed with 400 pelves (100 from each sex/race group of American Blacks and Whites) obtained from the Terry collection. Two types of discriminant function tests were employed. The first function utilized the original variables, i.e., bi-iliac breadth, and the transverse diameter and anteroposterior height of the pelvic inlet. The second function was generated after the effect of age on pelvic dimensions was removed by means of simple regression analyses. The results of the study indicated that there was, on the average, a decrease in the accuracy of racial classification from 80% to 77% in males and 84% to 75% in females. These decreases were not significant.