The unreliability of blood typing aged bone.

Abstract

When Boyd and Boyd (’33) and Candela ( ’36) first demonstrated the possibility of the ABO blood typing of aged human bone and tissues, anthropologists were quick to realize the potential value of such data for historical studies of human populations. It was, in fact, this appealing potential which encouraged the profession to have greater faith in the reliability of such tests than was actually warranted. Boyd and Boyd (’39), using 14 known autopsy samples up to five years old, achieved typing results which they called “encouraging but not as conclusive as would be wished for unknown material’’ (p. 424). When Candela ( ’40) successfully typed a portion of their material, doubts were somewhat relieved. But an element of uncertainty remains. In the first place, the growing literature of serological research leads to a conception of the blood group ABO polysaccharide-polypeptide antigens as substances immensely stable under some conditions, but contrastingly fragile under others. In the second place, the method employed in bone typing is not sufficiently exact or specific to meet the requirements of the problem. The several shortcomings of this method will be discussed below. When the Laboratory of Physical Anthropology was first set up at the University of Michigan under sponsorship of the Venner-Gren Foundation, we secured over 40 bone samples from individuals of known blood type at autopsy. These have been tested after aging by means of the standard inhibition